16 May 22
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If the Democratic response to Justice Alito’s draft opinion was largely rhetorical, was it also a missed opportunity?
Why hold the Senate vote? The roll call didn’t, in fact, reveal anything about where every senator stands; it showed only how hardened the parties have become, which everyone already knew. (Only the West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin crossed party lines.) But Schumer is eying the midterm elections. Democrats hope to entice voters to the polls, and to their side of the ballot, in the aftermath of an expected Supreme Court decision, this summer, overturning its landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. The Senate vote came barely a week after the leak of a draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, written by Samuel Alito and evidently joined by four other G.O.P.-appointed Justices, which argues that no right to abortion can be found in the Constitution or read into the Fourteenth Amendment, and that, therefore, no such right exists. Alito’s draft is so shabby and benighted that it might just be the straw that breaks originalism’s back. Politically, the consequences are less clear.
Unfortunately for Schumer, the Senate vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act serves Republicans in addition to Democrats, because the bill is out of step with public opinion on abortion; the majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal, but with some restrictions. You can’t be a little bit pregnant. But you can be something other than uncompromisingly pro-life (opposed to abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother) or unwaveringly pro-choice (permitting abortion into the last weeks of a healthy pregnancy). And in that place in between—a haunted place of difficulty, anxiety, relief, and grief—is where most Americans stand.
Politicians hoping to raise money off this latest battle are keen to depict it as a contest between the two parties, even though the people who have suffered most during this long war are poor women, poor families, and poor children. Structurally, the contest isn’t between Democrats and Republicans but between the people and the Constitution. Women have been trying to gain equal rights since the founding of this country, including by constitutional amendment. The last meaningful amendment to the Constitution—lowering the voting age to eighteen—was ratified in July, 1971. That December, the Court heard arguments in Roe. In March, 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states, where it was expected to be quickly ratified. That May, John George Schmitz, a Republican congressman representing California, introduced on the floor another proposal, the first right-to-life amendment, which would bar the states from depriving any individual of life “from the moment that he is conceived.” In the fifty years since, versions of this amendment have been introduced in Congress more than six hundred times.
If constitutional amendments were ratified by a simple majority of the popular vote (rather than by a two-thirds majority in each chamber of Congress and three-quarters of the states), the Equal Rights Amendment would have passed in the nineteen-seventies, and the right-to-life amendment would have failed. The people, as the political scientist Austin Ranney observed, “are considerably more receptive than members of Congress to constitutional change.” Americans polled in the seventies and eighties supported nine of eleven proposed constitutional amendments, including the direct election of the President, congressional term limits, and prayer in schools. The right-to-life amendment was the only one they absolutely rejected. The numbers have remained steady ever since, with a little under two-thirds opposed, and about a third in favor. Meanwhile, since the seventies, well more than three-quarters of Americans have consistently favored the E.R.A., including through its seeming failure, in 1982.
“All of America will be watching,” Schumer said, ahead of the abortion-bill vote, predicting that Republicans who opposed it would “suffer the consequences electorally.” The Times carried the vote live. Fox News didn’t bother. “Sadly, the Senate failed to stand in defense of a woman’s right about decisions about her own body,” Vice-President Kamala Harris, who presided over the roll call, told the press. “This vote clearly suggests that the Senate is not where the majority of Americans are on this issue.” Except that the legislation, as written, is not exactly where the majority of Americans are on this issue. And, although Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, centrist Republicans, gestured toward possible compromises, Democratic leaders, with the exception of Virginia’s Tim Kaine, have shown little interest in working together on narrower legislation. A compromised version, people evidently figured, would just die by filibuster.
If the Democratic response to the Alito draft was largely rhetorical—“Do something, Democrats!” anguished protesters chanted, outside the Supreme Court—was it also a missed opportunity? Republican officials at the federal and state levels have opposed government funding for child care, parental leave, sex education, and contraception, and for reproductive, maternal, neonatal and pediatric health services. In Republican-run Mississippi, where the Dobbs case originated, the rates of child poverty and infant mortality are the highest in the nation. (The U.S. maternal-mortality rate is the highest among developed nations.) Hours before the Senate vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and sometime Party renegade, implored Democrats to use the moment to press for maternal, infant, and child care. Could they have persuaded Republicans to support measures aimed at helping poor women and children? Unlikely, given the all-or-none state of politics. “Let’s do it,” Sasse said. Here, and only here, is where Democrats and Republicans agreed last week, both answering, in effect, “No, let’s run on this in November instead.”
Bucha. (photo: BBC)
Since Russian forces were pushed back from Kyiv at the end of March, the bodies of more than 1,000 civilians have been discovered in the Bucha region - many hastily buried in shallow graves. The BBC has learned that around 650 people were shot in what a senior police official has described as executions. Sarah Rainsford has been investigating what happened at a children's summer camp - now being treated as a crime scene.
To the right of the entrance, there are stones coated in blood that has turned dark red. Lying among that is a blue woollen hat with an exit hole in one side and its rim soaked in blood. In the wall, I counted at least a dozen bullet holes.
A couple of steps away are the remains of a Russian military ration pack - an open can of rice porridge with beef and an empty packet of crackers. A name daubed in graffiti on a wall is a reminder that the scene is a children's camp. But when Russian troops moved into Bucha, just outside the capital, in early March, Camp Radiant became an execution ground.
The story of the summer camp killings is chilling but so is this detail: more than 1,000 civilians were killed in the Bucha region during a month under Russian occupation, but most did not die from shrapnel or shelling. More than 650 were shot dead by Russian soldiers, according to a senior police official.
Now Ukraine is searching for their killers.
Volodymyr Boichenko lived in Hostemel, just up the road from Bucha and near the airfield where the first Russian forces landed to try to overthrow Ukraine's government. When his sister Aliona Mykytiuk decided to flee before the fighting reached her, she pleaded with Volodymyr to join her. He was a civilian, not a soldier, but he wanted to stay and help. So he spent the days searching Hostemel for food and water to bring to neighbours, including children, who were trapped in their cellars by the constant shelling and Russian airstrikes.
A chatty 34-year-old, who had travelled the world in the merchant navy, Volodymyr phoned his family from Hostemel most days to reassure them he was safe. Aliona would wait nervously for his brief calls: she knew he had to move to higher ground to get a connection and if the shelling was heavy it was impossible to leave the bomb shelter. As supplies ran low, she urged her brother to try to escape but by then the roads were blocked.
The last time Aliona heard from him was on 8 March. Volodymyr wasn't the demonstrative type, but that day he told his sister not to worry about him. "He said 'I really love you,' and that was so painful to hear," Aliona sobs, rubbing her eyes hard but unable to stop the tears. "There was fear in his voice."
Four days later, Volodymyr was spotted by neighbours close to Promenystyi, as it's known here, or Camp Radiant. Then he disappeared.
In March, the fighting around Kyiv was intense and the small town of Bucha was at the epicentre. The withdrawal of Russian troops in early April revealed scenes that shocked the world: the bodies of residents slumped in the streets where they'd been shot.
Moscow tells anyone who will listen that the killings were staged, an idea that is as twisted as it is patently false. Determined to hold those responsible to account, Ukrainian investigators are busy collecting the hard evidence on territory now back under their control.
"We don't know what Putin's plans are, so we are working as quickly as possible in case he drops a bomb and destroys all the proof," says Kyiv regional police chief, Andrii Niebytov.
That evidence includes a field full of civilian cars pierced with multiple bullet holes, now piled up on the edge of Bucha. They are vehicles that were shot at when families tried to flee. One still has a length of white cloth at the window, hung to show the soldiers that its occupants were no threat. Step too close, and you catch the sickly smell of death.
When the bodies beneath Camp Radiant were discovered on 4 April, Volodymyr Boichenko was among them. Aliona had spent weeks frantically calling hospitals and morgues. That day she was sent a photograph to identify. She knew it was her brother before it had even downloaded.
"I hate them with every cell of my being," Aliona cries, about Volodymyr's killers. "I know that's wrong to say about people, but they are not human. There was not one patch on those men's bodies that was not beaten."
The five men had been found crouching on their knees, heads down and hands bound behind their backs.
"We know they had been tortured," the police chief told the BBC. "The Russian army has crossed the line of how war is conducted. They were not fighting the military in Ukraine, they were kidnapping and torturing the civilian population."
Neither the Prosecutor's Office nor the SBU security service will disclose details of ongoing investigations, but some Russian military were so careless at covering their tracks that there are likely to be considerable clues to work with. Ukrainian territorial defence units have even discovered lists of soldiers at some abandoned positions. One appears to be part of a rota for litter duty, another includes passport details and mobile phone numbers.
With such a vast volume of work - more than 11,000 potential war crimes cases registered so far - Ukraine's security services have called on more digitally savvy civilians for help.
"I feel some call of duty," said Dmytro Replianchuk, a journalist at slidstvo.info who worked to expose corruption within Ukraine's law enforcement bodies before the war. Now he's joined forces with prosecutors, scouring the internet for extra data to help catch suspected war criminals.
"I understand it will be so hard and a lot of cases won't be solved. But in these weeks, it's important to find as much information as possible," Dmytro explained.
We found one potential clue among the litter at Camp Radiant - the wrapping from a parcel sent by a woman named Ksyukha to a Russian soldier whose own name and military unit are clearly marked. Unit 6720 is based in Rubtsovsk, in the Altai region of Siberia. It has been linked to Bucha before when soldiers from the town were caught on CCTV sending giant packages to relatives full of goods that they had looted from Ukrainian homes.
We can't be sure yet whether soldiers from Rubtsovsk were based at the children's camp, or were there when the men were killed. The police first need to establish a more precise time of death.
"We are working on it, but it's not a quick thing," Mr Niebytov explains. "But that camp was a headquarters so there would have been a commander. The soldiers could not have executed anyone without the commander's knowledge. So we will first find the organisers and then look for the implementers."
Across the road from Camp Radiant, behind a church spattered with shrapnel damage, a corner of Bucha is slowly showing renewed signs of life. Young boys run around the yard, while a man fixes sheets of wood to windows shattered when the town was being shelled, constantly. And a little shop has just reopened to serve others now trickling back to begin their own repairs.
As neighbours cross paths, they discuss the days when Russian tanks rolled into their town, the soldiers who would shoot wildly and those who roamed the streets drunk, breaking into homes and stealing from them. And they remember the local man who escaped to their block of flats from the summer camp opposite, and who they had sheltered despite the risk.
Viktor Sytnytskyi didn't know Camp Radiant before, but all the details he gives match up. He's now in western Ukraine and told me his story over the phone, calling from his car so he wouldn't upset his mother.
It was early March when Viktor was grabbed by Russian soldiers on the street. They tied his hands and pulled his hat down over his eyes, then dragged him to a cellar that he's sure was on the grounds of the children's camp.
There, the Russians poured water over his legs so he would freeze, and they held a gun to his head.
"They kept saying, 'Where's the fascists? Where's the troops? Where's Zelensky? One of them mentioned Putin so I said something rude and he hit me," Viktor recalls.
He remembers being angry at his captors as well as terrified. He had worked in Moscow in the past with men from Siberia and was horrified that Russians could now treat him with such brutality. Even more so, when one of the soldiers revealed that he, too, was from Siberia.
Viktor told him he was sad things had come to this.
"The sad thing is that our grandfathers fought together against the Nazis and now you're the fascists," was the Russian's angry reply.
"He told me: 'You have until the morning to remember what you've seen, and if not, you'll be shot.'"
That night, Viktor got lucky. There was heavy shelling and when he realised his captors were no longer guarding him, he ran for his life.
"I calculated that I had more chance of surviving under shelling than if I stayed in that cellar. They'd already put the gun to my head. What would it cost them to pull the trigger?"
From a common grave beneath the children's camp, Volodymyr Boichenko has now been given a proper burial beneath the cherry blossom in the old cemetery of Bucha.
After his funeral, Aliona says she finally saw her brother's face in her dreams again, as if he were comforting her.
But she still has many questions. The cross on Volodymyr's grave is marked only with his birthday, not the date of his death, because the family have no idea when he was shot.
They may never know, unless the Russian commander who took over Camp Radiant can be found.
Like everyone in Bucha, though, they do know that civilians are not only caught up in this war. They are being targeted - by Russian soldiers who either don't know the rules of war, or don't care.
Dr Shelly Tien at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City last December. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
As the US braces for the end of a federal right to abortion, a new six-week ban in Oklahoma offers a preview of what’s to come
A draft opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed access to abortion, had been published online and verified by the court. In the aftermath, Gallegos, the administrator for Tulsa Women’s Clinic, an Oklahoma-based abortion provider, wasn’t worried about Roe – at least, it wasn’t the first thing she was worried about. To her, there was a bigger, more immediate threat: a six-week abortion ban the Republican governor was expected to sign any day now. The law, a direct copycat of a prohibition in effect in Texas, was expected to survive legal challenges. It would take effect immediately.
Tuesday morning came and went. The governor hadn’t signed. Maybe, Gallegos thought, they had more time. A few more patients could get abortions. So she added a few back on the schedule for the next day – patients who were beyond six weeks pregnant, who soon might be unable to get an abortion in Oklahoma.
That same evening, to little fanfare, Governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the six-week abortion ban. The state supreme court declined to block the ban. If the clinic saw their patients on Wednesday, they risked civil lawsuits with a penalty of up to $10,000.
So Gallegos did what she had dreaded. She began calling back patients who were past six weeks pregnant. The scheduled appointments would have to be canceled. If they wanted to seek an abortion, she told them, they should look somewhere else – Kansas, New Mexico or, a bit further away, Colorado.
“We knew he was going to sign it. But there was still this moment of shock,” she reflected a week later. “He really signed it. This is real.”
Oklahoma’s six-week abortion ban, Senate Bill 1503, is only the second in the nation to go into effect. Texas, the first, has had its ban in place since 1 September. The impact of Oklahoma’s ban could be seismic in Texas and Oklahoma – last fall, Oklahoma emerged as the state that Texans seeking abortions were most likely to travel to for care. Some drove hundreds of miles, spending thousands of dollars to make the journey. Already, clinicians in Oklahoma are trying to devise strategies to help their patients get to clinics in neighboring Kansas. But there are limits to what they can do.
And even access at six weeks is not expected to last long. Last week’s draft leak has chilled abortion providers across the country, confirming what many had anticipated for months. Unless something dramatic shifts, the court will probably overturn Roe in a matter of weeks. When that happens, states will have the power to ban abortion entirely. And in both Oklahoma and Texas, that will happen. They are among the 13 states that have passed what are known as trigger laws – legislation crafted to ban abortion almost right away once Roe is struck down.
For many, the draft decision put a post-Roe reality into sharp clarity. But for clinicians in Oklahoma, like in Texas, the moment is already here. And few people are paying attention.
“There’s kind of this view of these states as disposable – that there aren’t valuable people that live here,” said Kailey Voellinger, who runs the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. “It feels like we’re afterthoughts.”
Since the new six-week ban took effect, neither President Joe Biden nor his press office has put out a statement about Oklahoma’s new law, despite publicly condemning similar bans passed in Texas and Idaho, and criticizing other Oklahoma bans that have not yet taken effect. (Idaho’s six-week ban has been blocked by its state supreme court.) The Department of Justice – which sprang into action when Texas’s six-week ban took effect – has been similarly quiet.
And in the meantime, patients keep calling the state’s four clinics for appointments.
Trust Women and Tulsa Women’s Clinic are still providing the service. Those who are providing care are only seeing patients up to six weeks of pregnancy, but patients well beyond that are still calling to seek abortions. Many learn about the new six-week ban only on that initial phone call.
“There’s a lot of shock and disbelief from patients, reacting like, ‘What do you mean I’ve got to go out of state?’ ‘That’s crazy, I can’t afford to take off work, I can’t leave my kids that long, how am I supposed to do that?’” Gallegos said.
Patients are angry, Voellinger said. “I’ve had two staff people tell me they got off the phone with a patient who was like, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do? Kill myself?’
“People are exasperated and don’t know what to do,” she added.
In the clinics, the shift has been stark. Right up until the six-week ban took effect, appointments had been booked solid, the waiting rooms full of Texans and Oklahomans. Abortion appointments were booked two to three weeks out.
That has changed since last week. But in the days after the six-week ban took effect, the Tulsa Women’s Clinic performed abortions for eight patients, and then 10 the next day. That represented about half the people who came in for abortions, Gallegos said. The rest thought they were within six weeks of pregnancy, but learned at the clinic they were too far along. On the third day after the ban, 20 patients – two-thirds of the people who had booked an appointment – were able to get the abortions they had sought.
There are no more Texans coming for care. And the tight timeline of six weeks, Gallegos added, means that the patients who are coming for abortions have barely had time to think about their decisions. They’re being forced to rush, often without the luxury of even an extra day.
“It’s awful to have to tell the patients, ‘You can ultimately do what you need to do, but if you don’t do this today you don’t have the option any more,’” she said.
The shift has been similar at Trust Women, which had, until April, been overwhelmed by patients traveling from Texas. Then last month, the looming threat of an Oklahoma abortion ban had caused the clinic to stop offering abortions for several weeks. On 22 April, with no ban yet in effect, they slowly resumed scheduling abortions – and, the following week, saw close to 50 abortion patients over three days.
Then SB 1503 was signed. Now the clinic sees maybe three patients a day. They’re sending the rest to Trust Women’s other clinic, in Wichita, Kansas, 160 miles (257km) away. Staff are traveling there as well to help. Already, the Kansas clinic is booked solid through May.
Starting next week, Trust Women is planning to experiment with a new model, where they perform sonograms and other preliminary work for patients at the Oklahoma clinic, and then help them drive to Kansas to pick up medication abortion pills – an extra two hours in the car. But those pills are only given to patients within their first trimester. And some patients, Voellinger acknowledged, won’t be able to get from Texas or Oklahoma all the way to Kansas.
Even before the supreme court rules on Roe – a decision is expected this summer – Oklahoma could ban almost all abortions. The state legislature has still not acted on another Texas-inspired abortion ban: a bill that also relies on civil litigation but that, unlike the laws active in Oklahoma and Texas, would ban abortions starting at fertilization, with narrow exceptions. The bill has passed in Oklahoma’s house, and an amended version has passed the senate – Oklahoma’s house needs to issue one more final approval of the amended ban before sending it to the governor’s desk. That vote has not been scheduled.
If that bill passes, Tulsa Women’s Clinic, which only does abortions, and whose affiliate clinic is in Texas, would probably shut down. Trust Women and Planned Parenthood would stop providing abortions, pivoting instead to emphasize other healthcare services and potentially providing non-abortion support to their Kansas-based clinics.
Every day is precarious, Voellinger said.
Turkey lays out demands as Finland, Sweden seek NATO membership. (photo: Yahoo! News)
Speaking after a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin, Mevlut Cavusoglu said he met his Swedish and Finnish counterparts and all were seeking to address Turkey's concerns.
He added that Turkey was not threatening anybody or seeking leverage but speaking out especially about Sweden's support for the PKK Kurdish militant group, deemed a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
Finland confirmed on Sunday that it would apply for NATO membership and Sweden is expected to follow suit, in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. However Turkey's concerns may pose an obstacle, as any decision on NATO enlargement requires unanimous approval by all 30 member states.
"There absolutely needs to be security guarantees here. They need to stop supporting terrorist organizations," Cavusoglu told Turkish reporters in Berlin. He added that Swedish and Finnish bans on exporting of some of their defence sector goods to Turkey must end.
"Our stance is perfectly open and clear. This is not a threat, this is not a negotiation where we're trying to leverage our interests," he said.
"This is not populism either. This is clearly about two potential member states' support for terrorism, and our solid observations about it, this is what we shared."
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan surprised NATO allies and the Nordic countries on Friday when he said Turkey could not support the enlargement plans given they were "home to many terrorist organisations", but his spokesperson told Reuters on Saturday that Turkey had not shut the door.
Cavusoglu repeated that Turkey, which joined NATO 70 years ago, does not oppose its open door policy.
He said the talks with Swedish and Finnish counterparts were good and that they made suggestions to alleviate Ankara's legitimate concerns, which Turkey would consider. He said he provided them proof of terrorists living in their states.
Cavusoglu again singled out Sweden as disrespecting Turkey's position and said PKK terrorist meetings took place in Stockholm over the weekend.
A Palestinian man cycles past a mural in honour Al-Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Aqleh, in Gaza City. (photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
Antony Blinken says US ‘deeply troubled’ after police stormed procession for Palestinian American journalist
“We are deeply troubled by the images of Israeli police intruding into the funeral procession of Palestinian American Shireen Abu Aqleh,” Antony Blinken’s statement on his official Twitter account read. “Every family deserves to lay their loved ones to rest in a dignified and unimpeded manner.”
Blinken’s brief statement came after television cameras captured police in Israel storming Abu Aqleh’s funeral procession.
Dozens of Palestinians were packed around the coffin, some waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “with our soul and blood we will redeem you Shireen”.
When they began walking toward the gates of St Joseph’s hospital, Israeli police officers, in an apparent attempt to stop them proceeding by foot rather than taking the coffin by car, burst through the courtyard gates and charged at the crowd. Some beat pallbearers with batons and kicked them.
At one point the group carrying her coffin backed against a wall and almost dropped the casket, recovering it just before one end hit the ground as stun grenades detonated.
The violent scenes, which lasted only minutes, added to Palestinian outrage over Abu Aqleh’s killing, which has threatened to fuel violence that has surged since March.
The show of force came after people circumvented roadblocks in occupied East Jerusalem to join the slain Al Jazeera reporter’s funeral procession. Mourners chanted “Palestine!”, sang the Palestinian national anthem and waved Palestinian flags before Israeli police cracked down on the procession, accusing participants of disrupting public order.
Israel forbids the public display of Palestinian flags, even at rallies and protests.
Abu Aqleh died after being shot in the head in the West Bank city of Jenin on Wednesday morning. Her colleagues have since said that she was killed in a burst of gunfire from Israeli forces on a small group of journalists covering an expected raid by Israel’s military.
The Israeli military issued condolences for Abu Aqleh’s death but has also maintained that its troops were returning fire at the scene and that the journalist may have actually been cut down by shots from Palestinian forces.
When she was killed, Abu Aqleh, 51, wore a helmet and body armor clearly marked “press”, according to video footage of her slaying.
Malerie Shockley, 24. (photo: Ash Adams/Marshall Project)
Hunter’s mother died when he was little, and his father later went to prison, court records show, leaving Hunter in a foster home. In the years that followed, he was owed nearly $700 a month in federal survivor benefits, an amount based on Social Security contributions from his mother’s paychecks. He doesn’t remember Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services ever informing him that it was routing this money — his safety net — into state coffers.
“It’s really messed up to steal money from kids who grew up in foster care,” said Hunter, now 21, who says he is struggling to afford college, rent and car payments. “We get out and we don’t have anybody or anything. This is exactly what survivor benefits are for.”
Roughly 10% of foster youth in the U.S. are entitled to Social Security benefits, either because their parents have died or because they have a physical or mental disability that would leave them in poverty without financial help. This money — typically more than $700 per month, though survivor benefits vary — is considered their property under federal law.
The Marshall Project and NPR have found that in at least 49 states* and Washington, D.C., foster care agencies comb through their case files to find kids entitled to these benefits, then apply to Social Security to become each child’s financial representative, a process permitted by federal regulations. Once approved, the agencies take the money, almost always without notifying the children, their loved ones or lawyers.
At least 10 state foster care agencies hire for-profit companies to obtain millions of dollars in Social Security benefits intended for the most vulnerable children in their care each year, according to a review of hundreds of pages of contract documents. A private firm that Alaska used while Hunter was in state care referred to acquiring benefits from people with disabilities as “a major line of business” in company records.
Some states also take veterans’ benefits from children with a parent who died in the military, though this has become less common as casualties have declined since the Iraq War.
State foster care agencies collected more than $165 million from these children in 2018 alone, according to the most recent survey data from the research group Child Trends. And the number is likely much higher, according to Social Security Administration data for 10 states obtained by a member of Congress and shared with The Marshall Project and NPR.
In New York, California and a handful of other states, foster care is run by counties, many of which also take this money, our reporting shows.
Nationwide, foster care agencies are funded through a complicated web of federal and state grants and subsidies, paid for by taxpayers. Children’s Social Security benefits were not intended to be one of those funding streams, according to federal law.
In a Marshall Project/NPR survey of all 50 state child services agencies, most pointed out that it is legal for them to apply to the Social Security Administration to become the financial representative for foster children’s benefits — though federal regulations state that a parent, foster parent, relative or family friend is preferred. Almost all said they take kids’ money as reimbursement for the cost of foster care, putting the funds in individual accounts to recoup what the state has paid for each child’s room and board.
In interviews, several officials also said that children in foster care are not mature enough to make good financial choices on their own, and that their family members or foster parents may have ill intentions and pocket the cash themselves.
Clinton Bennett, a spokesman for Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services, said the agency — like any parent — uses kids’ funds to pay for their daily expenses, such as shelter and food, rather than just giving them cash. Bennett added that due to confidentiality laws, he could not comment on individual cases like Hunter’s.
The state of Alaska is currently facing a landmark class-action lawsuit over this practice that may reach the state supreme court later this year.
But to youth advocates, the fact that many agencies spend children’s money on children’s services doesn’t make it better. That means kids are being made to pay for their own foster care — a public service that federal law and laws in all 50 states require the government to pay for.
“It’s like something out of a Charles Dickens novel,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland. “This is like confiscating someone’s Social Security benefits because they availed themselves of the fire department.”
As a state senator, Raskin introduced what appears to be the nation’s only law that curbs the practice, by requiring that the state save foster teens’ money for them. The measure passed in 2018.
Raskin is now working with Democratic Rep. Danny K. Davis of Illinois, who plans to introduce federal legislation later this year to ban all states from taking foster children’s money to reimburse themselves.
But many state officials and experts say there isn’t the political will in conservative-leaning statehouses to spend additional taxpayer dollars on poor youth, which is what it would take to stop using children’s own Social Security benefits to fund their foster care.
“Anyone in their right mind would tell you that we’re not to the level of full funding needed to care for these kiddos,” said Thomas McCarthy, spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, which pays a northern Virginia-based private company called Maximus, Inc., to obtain Social Security benefits from children in Milwaukee. “Like many states, we’re doing our best to make sure the foster system stays intact.”
In the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case Washington State v. Keffeler, 39 states’ attorneys general argued that losing foster children’s survivor and disability benefits could potentially cost state governments billions of dollars for years.
Daniel L. Hatcher, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a leading expert on this practice, said it invites a larger question about the role of government. “I think sometimes these officials are so in the weeds of getting funding however they can, they don’t even realize that this is not just another funding stream — this is literally children’s own money,” Hatcher said. “This is about whether we’re going to use abused and neglected children’s own money to pay for what we’re supposed to be providing them as a society.”
States first turned to for-profit companies to mine foster children for cash during the Reagan era. In a 1989 profile, The Washington Post reported that Maximus had brought “modern business management to the heart of the American underclass.”
The firm gets paid by public agencies to help them reduce costs and increase the efficiency of programs intended for people in poverty, including public assistance, health care and child support. Its motto is “Helping Government Serve the People.”
In 2005, the U.S. government said that Maximus was submitting false claims in the name of foster youth to Medicaid, another federal program, in order to collect revenue for the District of Columbia. The company agreed to pay more than $30 million to settle the case, court records show.
There are no accusations that Maximus is engaging in unlawful behavior related to its work regarding foster youths’ Social Security benefits.
Documents from 2013 to 2019 show that Maximus’s consultants evaluate each foster child to see if they previously had a “representative payee” for their Social Security benefits — a parent, grandparent or other guardian — who could be replaced by the state via paperwork submitted to the Social Security Administration.
The company also looks at private health records, caseworker notes, school performance and other information to see whether the children have PTSD, depression, anxiety or other mental health issues, often stemming from the trauma that led to them being in foster care. If so, the kids could be classified as having an emotional disability, and additional benefits obtained for the state.
James Dunn, vice president for marketing and public relations at Maximus, said in a statement that the company’s “success in helping connect foster children with these benefits is not only a success for the child, but also for caseworkers who are freed up to focus on the day-to-day well-being of these vulnerable children, and for the state or government agency paying for services that keep foster children safe, secure and cared for.”
Dunn added that at no time does Maximus take possession of kids’ Social Security funds; the money all goes to the state agencies.
States often pay Maximus a flat fee for this work, sometimes only after children’s benefits have been secured.
In a status report submitted to Florida in 2012, another firm called Public Consulting Group, Inc., discussed using data-mining techniques and predictive analytics to more efficiently “target” and “score” children in order to maximize Social Security dollars. And a PCG proposal submitted in 2018 to Delaware said the company has made millions for child welfare agencies — which it referred to as “customers” — by applying for benefits for children with physical and emotional disabilities.
Stephen P. Skinner, spokesman for Public Consulting Group, said in a statement that obtaining kids’ Social Security dollars is a service requested by the state agencies and is consistent with federal regulations. How children’s money is spent is the responsibility of each state, he said, not the company.
“PCG is proud of the work it does to effectively support child welfare agencies and the children who depend on them,” Skinner said.
In Alaska, more than 250 current and former foster children — many of them Alaska Native — are part of the class-action lawsuit demanding that the state pay their Social Security money back.
The state children’s services office initially claimed in court that it shouldn’t have to notify youths about taking their money because such a process would be too burdensome.
The judge, William F. Morse, rejected that argument in 2019. But he ruled this past January that although it was “undoubtedly true” that the state obtained these kids’ benefits for its own coffers, the young people seeking to be repaid would have to prove there is someone who could have been a better financial representative for them.
Lawyers for the children said they plan to appeal that decision.
The Marshall Project and NPR asked six current and former foster youth in Alaska how they could have put their money to use. Some said they might have saved for college, tutoring, therapy, a phone or laptop, or clothes suitable for job interviews. Others needed a security deposit so they could finally have their own apartment after bouncing between foster homes for so many years.
During Malerie Shockley’s time in Alaska’s foster system, she was moved more than 20 times between homes and facilities, according to notes she took, and she was abused in several of them, she says. Shockley, now 24, had her disability benefits taken by the state to help pay for that foster care experience, records show. “What did I get in return for my money? More trauma,” she said.
Just over 80% of older youth in foster care have experienced one or more traumas that could result in them having PTSD, according to one 2012 study. Another study found that at least 36% of all kids who age out of the system become homeless by age 24.
Cornelius Levering, 27, a former foster youth in Nebraska, says he struggled to get by after the state took his Social Security benefits. At one point, he says, he had to walk more than a dozen miles every day to and from a job because he couldn’t afford to put gas in his car.
“I don’t think people realize the intensity of the position you’re in when you age out of foster care,” said Levering, who now works as a youth advocate for Nebraska Appleseed. “They kick you out the door and say figure it out, usually without a dime to your name.”
Youth advocates say that at the very least, every child in foster care and their lawyer, if they have one, should be notified that the state has taken their benefits. It’s in the Constitution, they say: The government can’t take your possessions without giving you a chance to contest it.
In the Marshall Project/NPR survey of state foster care agencies, about half of the 30 states that responded said that if a child was already receiving Social Security benefits before entering foster care, officials notify the child’s parent or previous financial representative that the state will be taking over the money. A few states also said that information about these benefits is in the kids’ case files, which their lawyer should have access to.
But almost all of the agencies either declined to answer questions about their notification practices or said they do not provide an explanation to children or their loved ones or advocates about the money the state takes from them.
As a result, youths typically don’t find out about their cash until it is already gone. This is often just a few months before they exit foster care, when they start talking to a social worker about applying for benefits as an adult. Some said they didn’t figure it out until they applied for food stamps or other federal assistance — and were told they already should have been receiving Social Security.
A Social Security spokesperson said that when a state foster care agency is named a child’s financial representative, the Social Security Administration notifies the child’s current guardian and sometimes their parents too. But critics note that in the case of many foster children, their guardian is the agency itself.
The spokesperson also pointed out that per federal law, the Social Security Administration conducts regular oversight of state foster care agencies that obtain kids’ benefits. These reviews, the spokesperson said, occur about every four years and include interviews with a sample of children as well as people in their lives, asking them if their money is being used in their best interests.
But the Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration has found in at least four reports that this oversight is inconsistent, resulting in young people’s savings being spent in ways that do not benefit them.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a case brought by a Washington state family that claimed it was a violation of federal law for the state to take Social Security benefits from foster youth.
The court’s ruling left several questions unresolved, including whether states must notify youth when obtaining their Social Security benefits. The decision also didn’t address whether the practice raises an “equal protection” problem because only foster children with disabilities or a deceased parent are in effect paying for their own care, while other foster children are not.
Now Congress could take up the matter, possibly as soon as this summer. The proposed legislation would prohibit states from taking kids’ cash to cover public expenses, require that every foster child and their lawyer be regularly notified about their benefits and offer protected trust accounts to hold the money in until recipients reach adulthood.
The bill would also require that states continue to screen foster children for Social Security eligibility so that these agencies don’t stop helping kids get benefits just because they no longer have a financial incentive to do so. (A similar bill is making its way through the Texas legislature.)
In the meantime, some young people in Alaska are already starting to see progress.
Mateo Jaime is among them. Raised in Texas, he was 15 when his father murdered his mother in their family home. In shock, Jaime moved in with a relative in Alaska but was soon left in the foster system.
Jaime was passionate about playing cello; he’d been preparing to audition for all-state orchestra before the murder happened. But he had to leave his instrument at the crime scene, and couldn’t afford a replacement. In fact, in the years that followed, he could hardly afford to eat, he says.
Even as Jaime struggled, Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services was taking survivor benefits from him — more than $20,000 in total — that he was owed as a result of his mom’s death. But last year, the agency paid him back without explanation, he says.
Jaime now has his own bank account and car — and finally, a new cello. Now 19, he is in college and leaning toward a major in music. He has an upcoming recital where he’ll play Rachmaninoff before a jury of professors. “For the first time,” he said, “I’m hopeful about the future.”
A whale shark near Isla Mujeres, Mexico. (photo: iStock)
But the creatures are no match for industrial ships — and a new study suggests modern shipping is killing far more of the endangered species than previously thought.
In a study published in the journal PNAS, an international group of scholars sounds the alarm for whale sharks. Although they are found in every ocean, Rhincodon typus are largely found in tropical waters. They like to swim near the surface of the sea — and their numbers have been falling.
The study, which lays out the results of a global tracking project, explains why.
Using satellite-linked tags, the team tracked movements of 348 whale sharks. Then they matched the data with information about the movements of the kinds of ships capable of killing the massive animals. More than 90 percent of the whale activity overlapped with busy shipping corridors.
There’s no reporting requirement for vessels that strike whale sharks, but the researchers were able to pinpoint hot spots for the animals. The tags were designed to pop off animals that had remained at a constant ocean depth for a long period of time — a signal that the animal was lying dead on the seafloor. After ruling out transmitters with technical issues, the researchers learned that the tags popped off most often in busy shipping areas.
“We propose that ship strikes may have been responsible for a substantial proportion of these [transmitter tag pop-offs] but were undetected or unreported by vessels,” they write.
“Incredibly, some of the tags recording depth as well as location showed whale sharks moving into shipping lanes and then sinking slowly to the seafloor hundreds of meters below, which is the ‘smoking gun’ of a lethal ship strike,” David Sims, a University of Southampton marine ecology professor and co-author, said in a news release. “It is sad to think that many deaths of these incredible animals have occurred globally due to ships without us even knowing to take preventative measures.”
It is unclear how many whale sharks are in the world’s oceans, but the population is thought to have declined about 50 percent in the past century. The animals are an important part of the marine food web.
Ship speed limits and collision reporting requirements could help, the authors write. Although local conservation laws cover whale sharks in parts of their range, they are not covered by any international laws.
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