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Is anyone actually winning this war right now? How do we even judge what success looks like for Russia or Ukraine at the moment?
You have to judge it based on the strategies and the political objectives that you think these two actors are pursuing. For Russia, it’s very clear that seizing the administrative territories of the Donbas is their minimal goal. And if they are successful and then are given substantial time to recuperate, they may not stop there. In the second phase of this war, the Russian military is operating much more in the way they were trained and organized to fight — unlike the first phase, which was principally a botched regime-change operation.
This strategy seems centered on attrition warfare as the principal Russian approach. That’s in part because the force they are fighting with has been substantially depleted. The Russian military took very heavy losses in the first phase of the war in terms of personnel and equipment. It is also because this type of warfare strongly favors the Russian military doctrinally. It’s a military based around firepower with a tremendous amount of artillery.
So the Russian approach has been to essentially grind their way toward incremental territorial gains. The Ukrainian strategy, thus far in the second phase, has been to try to exhaust Russian forces, leverage urban terrain, and fight for every piece of it in order to inflict the maximum amount of casualties so that the Russian offensive eventually runs out of steam. In the interim, they’ve conducted localized counter attacks around Kharkiv, Izium, and in Kherson, but these are not major counteroffensives.
The Ukrainian military also suffered badly from casualties, losing a tremendous amount of personnel, but they are also very short on ammunition. And this has been very much an artillery war. It may look like a modern war on the internet, but for all the videos of anti-tank guided missiles and air defenses and the like, this war is one largely being fought with artillery.
And so the Ukrainian military right now is at the most dangerous point in this second phase. I think the first period of the war perhaps created undue optimism. Ukraine defied the expectations of many, including myself, in terms of military performance. However, at this stage, there is perhaps undue pessimism. The Ukraine situation is quite difficult, but Russian gains have been fitful and incremental. The offensive is exhausting, and the Russian military has major structural issues when it comes to availability of manpower. It was designed much more for a short, sharp, conventional war with NATO than a conflict of this type. And so it, too, is struggling and will continue to struggle, with both militaries now digging into reserves, those with much less training, lower morale, and poor equipment. Wars like this often come down to attrition and those who have the most staying power on the battlefield.
From the beginning, President Zelenskyy has been pleading for more firepower from the West. The U.S. and Europe have provided lots of weaponry and a huge amount of money, but let’s say they gave him everything he wanted. To what extent would that enable Ukraine to possibly turn the tide in the Donbas? Or would it mean things just return to a stalemate?
Right now, it’s very premature to assess the trajectory of the war. More than likely, after this period of fighting, there will be an operational pause. Both sides will try to rearm, refit, and replenish their forces. Then Ukraine is likely to attempt a counteroffensive, but it will be easier to gauge whether Ukraine can take back substantial amounts of territory once it’s significantly armed with western weapons.
At least from my point of view, there is no looming stalemate or frozen conflict yet in this war. Stalemates are often declared, but they are a temporary state of affairs. The military balance is actually quite dynamic, and you are likely going to see territory still changing hands across the rather sprawling battlefield, which stretches all the way from Kherson, in the southwest, to Kharkiv.
The forces appear relatively balanced, such that neither can substantially make progress. But that’s deceptive, particularly in a war of attrition. It may appear that both sides are holding their lines, but in a sustained war of attrition, one military is going to be depleting the capability of the other — their forces, their equipment, their morale — perhaps at a much higher rate. In that kind of scenario, it will be hard to see a front that’s about to collapse until it does.
Right now, neither side has the forces to pursue maneuver warfare. Neither side is able to attain a substantial local advantage with enough reserves to really exploit any kind of operational maneuver. But that can change over time. The big Russian advantage over the Ukrainian military is firepower, since they understand that a shortage of manpower is their biggest weakness.
Russian forces have been degraded, and, as we’ve discussed, its original invasion strategy was ill considered. It also seems that Putin is not somebody who’s going to take the half-win of simply capturing territory in eastern Ukraine. But does he even have the capability to make another push into central and western Ukraine?
My view is that the Russian military barely has the capability to take the Donbas. And even that outcome is very much in doubt right now for them. But this is a conversation about today. It’s clear that if given the opportunity to expand this war, the Russian objective is to take Ukraine’s southern coast all the way to Odesa. That would dramatically impinge on Ukraine’s viability economically as a state. Those may seem to be unrealistic aspirations right now, but this war is likely to become protractive, and it’s important to consider that it can take different trajectories, one in which there is a prolonged postwar period, let’s say, as you put it, a stalemate emerges.
As I put it wrongly.
It’s okay. Such that it gives Russian forces a long enough time period to recover from their losses, Russia is very likely to pursue another offensive operation to capture more Ukrainian territory. That is, they are not going to be satisfied with the minimal gains in the Donbas. That’s more of a question of when and whether or not they will be able to reacquire the means to do it.
And it’s also about the trajectory of any possible peace talks, right? Because Ukraine is claiming that it will settle for nothing less than clawing back everything it’s lost, and Russia has bigger aspirations. So it’s hard to imagine the two sides’ interests aligning enough to discuss a settlement anytime soon.
Yeah. And of course the biggest reason for that is that all those conversations at this stage are very premature. Battlefield performance is going to determine the political position and the prospects of both sides in this contest.
The other element of this is that the war is also obviously having a huge effect on the energy market and the market for other goods.
I got gas yesterday. I saw.
Yeah, I don’t have to tell you. Europe is suffering far worse than the U.S. in this regard, and European leaders seem a little less patient about the trajectory of the war. President Biden has said that he wouldn’t pressure Zelenskyy into establishing peace talks. I think European leaders might have a different take on that, even if they continue to show solidarity. If Ukraine continues to suffer setbacks, how long do you think the American — or European — patience would last?
I cannot predict either our will or the will of our political leadership or that of people in other countries. What I can offer you is a comment on how I see the determinants of the military balance between the two sides. And the way I would frame this is that military balance helps set some expectations but it is not predictive of outcome. You cannot predict what’s going to happen in a battle or particular set of battles.
At the moment, the local military balance favors Russia — not dramatically but significantly. The long-term military balance favors Ukraine. But that is highly contingent on Ukraine being able to gain sustained military support from the United States and other European countries. That, of course, hinges on political will and cohesiveness. And over time, Ukraine could turn its advantage in manpower together with aid from the West into a combat-credible force, which is something that is in its nascent stages right now. But these expectations are strongly tied to assumptions about sustained western support. And I can only frame the conversation this way. I can’t answer the question because I have no ability to predict the future to that extent. If I did, I would be far wealthier than I am.
Historically, Russia has been able to win wars of attrition by just throwing people onto the battlefield, right? So far in this conflict they’ve suffered tremendous losses, as you said — upwards of 10,000 soldiers by most estimates, and possibly many more. How long can Putin keep up his approach with this kind of casualty rate?
I don’t think the approach Russia has taken is ultimately sustainable. But behind the scenes, they have been conducting a sort of shadow mobilization, recruiting what personnel they can to replace their losses. So it’s clear they are committed to a protracted war; it’s just not clear what their capacity is to sustain it. You are right that despite tremendous casualties, the Russian military remains on the battlefield, still prosecuting their offensive. Russia is well known for its endurance and ability to sustain prolonged attrition, and that continues to be a defining characteristic in this war.
The U.S. and Europe cut Russia off almost entirely after the invasion, refusing to buy the country’s oil and imposing severe and unprecedented sanctions. But most of the rest of the world hasn’t gotten on board with this strategy, and Russia is now making more money from oil, gas, and coal than ever. Can Putin hold out indefinitely, economically speaking?
I do think the Russian economy can hold out for quite a long time, but it will become relatively primitive and ultimately disconnected from the modern global economy in many respects. I think the worst impact of sanctions and export controls is yet to come and hasn’t been fully felt. And so it’s difficult to assess the situation this early into it.
Is it fair to say that even a severe economic crisis in Russia is unlikely to threaten Putin’s power given the lack of opposition he faces?
I think authoritarian systems often look very stable until the very end. They are the kind of systems that, to borrow a phrase from someone else, lose their political support gradually and then very suddenly. The truth is that it is a fool’s errand to try to predict regime change in a personal authoritarian system. That said, I have a fairly pessimistic outlook on the Putin regime’s longevity. This is more intuition than prediction.
My intuition tells me that the Putin regime is very much on a downward slope. That said, I’m also of the belief that if this regime sees a significant change, it’ll be driven by Russian elites and will more than likely replace one authoritarian with a different authoritarian. Because I don’t hold to the camp of folks who think that suddenly democracy will explode in Russia.
Are there still people who think that?
Listen, if there are people who thought it was going to happen in Iraq, there are definitely people who think it will happen in Russia. There are always people who think that.
Uvalde. (photo: Twitter/Statesman/KVUE)
The on-scene commander, Pete Arredondo, decided to “place the lives of officers over the lives of children,” DPS Director Steve McCraw said Tuesday.
Describing the police response to the massacre at Robb Elementary School as an “abject failure,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said there was a “sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject” just 180 seconds after Salvador Ramos, 18, started shooting inside the school.
In all, Ramos fired off at least 171 rounds that day, according to McCraw.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers over the lives of children,” said McCraw, adding, “The officers had weapons. The children had none.”
That commander was Chief Pete Arredondo of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department, who previously claimed he couldn’t engage Ramos because Ramos was holed up in a locked classroom.
However, McCraw said the classroom doors “could not lock from the inside,” and that cops did not storm the building for fear of being shot themselves.
In fact, McCraw revealed on Tuesday, officers never even tried the door handle.
“One hour, 14 minutes and eight seconds—that’s how long the children waited and the teachers waited...to be rescued,” said McCraw. “While they waited, the on-scene commander waited for radios and rifles, waited for shields, and waited for SWAT. Lastly, he waited for a key that was never needed.”
BREAKING: Multiple officers were inside Robb Elementary School with rifles and at least one ballistic shield at 11:52 a.m. the day of the shooting, new video and other evidence shows. They didn’t enter the classroom for another 58 minutes. More soon via @statesman and @KVUE. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/0BcYgq2hcQ
— Tony Plohetski (@tplohetski) June 20, 2022
In a transcript of a call that day between Arredondo and a police dispatcher, Arredondo made clear his concern that Ramos was armed with a rifle and that his own officers were armed only with handguns. On Tuesday, McCraw slammed the commander for his hesitation, arguing that cops have risky jobs. Yet, if there is even “one officer” on the scene, that officer has an obligation to “immediately engage the shooter.”
“He was right—officers are likely to get hurt, and some may die,” McCraw said during the session called by the Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans. “But it’s less likely that they would than children without the armor, without the weapons, without the training, left alone with someone who... ultimately killed 21 people.”
In an “active shooter environment,” McCraw continued, “That’s intolerable.”
Responding officers had at least two rifles and ballistic shields shortly after arriving at Robb Elementary, according to McCraw. Still, he said, their inaction cost nearly two dozen lives.
About 20 minutes after the shooting started, a special agent with the Texas Department of Public Safety showed up to assist. In official transcripts reviewed by the Texas Tribune, the agent quickly asked an officer if any kids were still inside the classrooms.
“If there is, then they just need to go in,” the agent said, according to the outlet.
“It is unknown at this time,” the officer replied.
“Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?” the agent responded. “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there.”
“Whoever is in charge will determine that,” said the cop.
“Well, there’s kids over here,” he said. “So I’m getting kids out.”
Breaking: Video and transcripts reviewed by The @TexasTribune of the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting show police officers were equipped to confront the shooter with guns, shields and tools.
— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) June 21, 2022
Then they didn’t — for more than an hour. https://t.co/6LI87OYPw5
Other issues also conspired to make things worse that day, according to McCraw. For example, there were no deadbolts on the exterior doors, the fence surrounding the school was too low and broken in certain areas, and Robb Elementary suffered from a “lack of controlled access points,” he said.
The portable radios used by dedicated school police officers also did not work inside Robb Elementary. In fact, the only radios that worked inside the building were those carried by U.S. Border Patrol agents who showed up to assist.
McCraw pointed the finger not only at Uvalde police for their inaction, but also at members of the public who did not notify authorities about worrying behavior by Ramos.
“What was concerning is that no one brought it to the attention [of law enforcement],” he said. “...Some people were getting [disturbing] messages, were concerned, and sometimes blocked the subject from communication.”
Director McCraw’s reference materials for his testimony before the Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans are provided here. #Uvalde pic.twitter.com/7pONvTh95e
— Texas DPS (@TxDPS) June 21, 2022
McCraw also said Ramos engaged in animal cruelty which is “something to look for” when trying to identify future violent tendencies. But he said nothing in Ramos’ disciplinary files raised any red flags.
Sounding alternately infuriated and exasperated, McCraw said the “law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”
The committee was formed in the wake of the deadliest school shooting in Texas history at the behest of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who instructed the members to hold hearings on school safety, police training, social media, mental health, and firearm safety.
Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys. (photo: MSNBC)
Here’s U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, looking like an extra in a straight-to-DVD Western.
COME AND TAKE IT pic.twitter.com/kwFrT61stF
— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) February 25, 2022
J.R. Majewski, a Republican candidate for Congress in Ohio, ran an ad (since taken down for copyright issues) in which images of President Joe Biden, Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Colin Kaepernick (?!) are flashed on the screen, and then Majewski casually walks around with a rifle and says he’ll “do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory.”
Blake Masters, the Trump-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona, builds his own guns and recently showed one off on social media with the caption: “I will remind everyone in Congress what ‘shall not be infringed’ means.”
It’s an especially sinister message, given that Masters’ potential opponent is U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, whose wife former Rep. Gabby Giffords was badly injured in a 2011 mall shooting.
From Arizona, where state Sen. Wendy Rogers spoke approvingly of hanging political enemies at a white nationalist rally, to Oklahoma, where the GOP chair and candidate for Congress talked about putting Anthony Fauci in front of a firing squad, Republicans are frequently musing about committing violence against their political opponents.
Closer to home, Scott Jensen, the likely GOP nominee for governor, has twice called for Secretary of State Steve Simon to be imprisoned, echoing Donald Trump’s caw of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. Simon was the victim of an antisemitic attack by his presumptive Republican opponent Kim Crockett, who proceeded to seemingly laugh off the apology offered by the state Republican Party on her behalf.
Although the wink-and-nod calls for violence have become more extreme and florid in recent years, the roots of this political pathology lie not with Trump and his red hats, however.
America has a long history of political violence, often — though not always — rooted in white supremacy. As Jelani Cobb recounted in 2020, the American Party, aka the “Know Nothings,” were infamous for their bludgeoning mobs, particularly against immigrant voters.
The brutal caning of abolitionist U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner by U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate in 1856 was just the most infamous attack during a time when physical combat in the U.S. Congress was shockingly common, as historian Joanne Freeman records in “The Fields of Blood.” Between 1830 and 1860, there were more than 70 violent incidents in House and Senate chambers, on nearby streets and — yes, this is real — ”dueling grounds.”
In the Jim Crow era, civil rights advocates who tried to register voters in the South were terrorized and murdered.
In the present, when Sharron Angle was running for the U.. Senate against Democratic Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada in 2010, she said something that sounded ominous: “I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”
She seemed to be turning Abraham Lincoln’s “ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets” on its head.
Owing to her general level of dunderheadness, Angle was viewed by national politicos as a bit of a loon, a western oddity, and Reid dispensed with her by 40,000 votes, and we all moved on.
Dismissing Angle was a mistake. For millions of Americans, her “Second Amendment remedies” comment was not beyond the pale. Far from it.
This notion among some gun rights activists and their allies on the right is so ingrained as to be almost banal.
Writing in the conservative journal National Review eight years later, David French spelled out the argument in detail while defending the right of Americans to collect arsenals of high powered weaponry: “Citizens must be able to possess the kinds and categories of weapons that can at least deter state overreach, that would make true authoritarianism too costly to attempt.”
What if this is backwards? Well-armed partisans emerge as the paramilitary wing of authoritarian parties, using violence and the threat of violence to vault the movement to power.
As Michael Dolan and Simon Frankel Pratt have written in Foreign Policy, fascism entails, among other things, the “growing union of right-wing party politics and paramilitary street violence.”
The recent hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol have highlighted the role of the paramilitary wing of the Trumpist movement in the coup attempt, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, a group also represented at the State Capitol in St. Paul on the same day.
The same type of Republican politicos who wave guns around in their public appeals for votes have defended the violent attack on the Capitol, which remember included a failed attempt to capture or kill former Vice President Mike Pence.
Members of Congress — people who serve with colleagues whose lives were in danger on Jan. 6 — have referred to the insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”
They are absolving the newly emergent paramilitary wing of the GOP.
You may ask: Whatabout the guy who showed up in Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood with a gun intending to kill Kavanaugh before he called 911 on himself? Or the man who shot Rep. Steve Scalise five years ago Tuesday? Or the killing of Aaron Danielson in Portland during the tumultuous summer of 2020? Or the arsonists who sacked and burned down the Third Precinct?
These are concerning examples, but they don’t constitute the formation of an organized paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party.
When hundreds of thousands of women in pink hats marched in Washington, no one feared they might storm the Capitol.
What’s astounding — a touch laughable even — is the idea that these right wing militants would take up arms against a government led by … President Joe Biden or Gov. Tim Walz. These men want to increase taxes a little on the rich, give some money to the poor, and maybe do a little something about global warming. Mostly, they want to be liked.
People who seek to take up arms against these men are like Walter Sobchack in “The Big Lebowski” pulling a gun on the pacifist Smokey because he stepped over the line during a bowling league match.
This has nothing to do with Vietnam, Walter.
Just as likely, they’ve been used, conned by Fox News for ratings and by Trump, who collected $250 million for his fake “Election Defense Fund” from small donors convinced the election had been stolen.
As with Sharron Angle, however, we can’t laugh off all the menacing rhetoric, or the politicians playing gun cosplay, or the failed coup.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
An rally at the Supreme Court building for abortion rights. (photo: Columbia News)
Will states seeking to provide safe haven for abortion patients in the wake of Roe reconsider their parental consent laws?
The only remaining neighbor is New Mexico, where patients who have the means to travel can receive care under some of the country’s most liberal regulations. But New Mexico’s clinics have limited capacity: In 2019, the state’s providers performed about 3,800 abortions, compared to more than 55,000 in Texas. For many of those unable to secure an appointment, the next closest option is Colorado, a state with no gestational age limits, waiting periods, or other controls.
But if the person seeking an abortion is under the age of 18, she may run into a problem there that she wouldn’t face in New Mexico. Colorado has a parental notification law, whereby a provider must inform a minor’s parent or guardian before performing the procedure. Many teenagers choose to involve their parents regardless of the law, but not all may feel comfortable or safe doing so. In such a situation, a teen can obtain a waiver known as a judicial bypass by relaying to a judge why it’s in her best interest not to involve her parents. Under this process, a youth who’s wary of confiding in her own family instead has to divulge details of her pregnancy in court to someone she’s never met.
“No matter what, you have to establish the fact of the pregnancy and the fact you don’t want it, and that means, at age 15, telling a weird old man judge about your sex life,” Kiki Council, a Colorado attorney who represents minors in judicial bypass proceedings pro bono, told The Intercept. A teenager doesn’t want to go on a stand and explain how “I wasn’t using condoms one time, and the consequences of that, just so my parent doesn’t find out, my parent who I know will kick me out or abuse me or harm me in some way.”
When news emerged that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, many noted that states with fewer abortion restrictions like Colorado would become safe havens for those around the country looking to exercise their decadeslong right to choose. But several liberal states have parental notification or consent laws, including Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, and Minnesota. Most states across the country — 37 — require some form of adult involvement.
These laws function as extra barriers, if not deterrents, for teenagers seeking abortion that states do not force upon people over 18 years old. Minors already face disadvantages by nature of their age: They don’t necessarily have the money to pay for an abortion, may be unable to drive to a clinic, or can’t miss school without an administrator calling their parents.
Put another way, state laws make it so that a child is more likely to endure a forced pregnancy than an adult. And yet minors may not have fully developed bodies to carry pregnancies safely, or the economic or psychological capacity to parent once a baby arrives.
Texas exemplifies the unique challenges minors are poised to face when Roe falls. “Youth often have irregular periods, or they might find out they’re pregnant and not know who to talk to right away, so even if they find out before six weeks, it might take them time to find a clinic or to find a trusted adult to talk with,” Rosann Mariappuram, executive director of Jane’s Due Process, a nonprofit that helps minors navigate Texas’s parental consent laws, told The Intercept. By that point, they may have missed the window of opportunity.
Once Roe is overturned, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute. What’s more, the Supreme Court decision that mandated states provide minors with an option to waive parental involvement laws could be rescinded if Roe topples. The 1973 milestone case did not establish a right to abortion for minors — that came a few years later with Belotti v. Baird. The court determined that states like Maryland, which at the time required parental permission for abortion on the basis that minors are supposedly incompetent, must guarantee a bypass option.
A major question is whether the more liberal state governments with parental involvement laws, in trying to make their jurisdictions safe places for people seeking abortion around the country, will try to repeal them. But parental involvement is one of the most controversial issues surrounding abortion access today.
“Historically, every single time there’s been any sort of ballot initiative to restrict abortion rights, it has failed,” Council said of Colorado. “The only, only ballot initiative restricting abortion access that has passed in Colorado in its entire history … is parental involvement.”
In fact, when Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed the Reproductive Health Equity Act in April to protect the right to an abortion, he included his own statement clarifying that the law did not affect Colorado’s parental notification requirement. This was never on the table, Council said, but it was still the No. 1 issue legislators fixated on. “‘This is about parental rights’ — that was the hammer that they kept banging on — like, ‘This is about me as a parent, knowing what’s going on with my child.’” A spokesperson for Polis did not reply to a request for comment on whether he supports parental notification laws.
In Michigan, where Democrat Gretchen Whitmer holds the governor’s seat but Republicans control the state legislature, minors have a harder time accessing abortion because they need their parents’ permission. An initiative called Reproductive Freedom for All is underway to get the more than 425,000 signatures needed to hold a ballot vote safeguarding abortion access, as the state is expected to see an influx of Midwesterners seeking care. It would include a legal framework to ensure that minors can get an abortion without involving parents, Merissa Kovach, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, told The Intercept.
But Michigan’s anti-abortion community is rallying against it. In an interview, Christen Pollo, spokesperson for Citizens to Support MI Women and Children, said that consent laws protect parents’ rights and ensure they can provide emotional support to their kids. And there are dangers that come with rescinding them, she argued. “One concern is that parental consent ensures that those who would abuse minor girls cannot then erase the evidence of their crimes in the nearest abortion clinic. … If a parent doesn’t even know that an abortion has been performed on their child, they don’t know what to look out for warning signs that that surgery may have been botched.”
Council believes that conservatives are trying to create “a chilling effect” by enforcing parental involvement laws. Many of her clients, she said, assume that because they can’t get abortions without notifying their parents, they can’t obtain birth control without letting them know either. “That is not true in Colorado, and I’m telling you right now that 99 percent of my clients could have prevented their abortion by getting birth control without parental consent, and they didn’t know that they could do that.”
Some conservative states, like Florida, have ramped up parental involvement requirements. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law mandating consent in 2020. And at the federal level, Republicans have introduced bills to require parental notification nationwide. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., introduced such a measure last year; it has 13 co-sponsors.
Illinois stands out as the only state in the country to enact a repeal of a parental involvement law, which went into effect June 1. The change was made possible by Democrats holding supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office.
Still, it wasn’t easy. In anticipation of Roe being overturned, Illinois has worked to expand access to abortion, but the parental notification repeal wasn’t viable until recently. Even legislators relatively supportive of abortion rights were uncomfortable with the idea of making it easier for pregnant teenagers to obtain a safe abortion.
“I think the reflexive position is, parents should know when their child is facing an unwanted pregnancy and that they would want them to go to them for help, and of course we want that for anybody who’s in that situation,” Rep. Anna Moeller, who sponsored the repeal in Illinois’s General Assembly, told The Intercept. “Unfortunately, there are young people out there who don’t have that, and so it takes a longer conversation to explain that.”
She added that critics often complain about the erosion of parental rights, a grievance that has greater salience in today’s political climate as conservatives are galvanizing a culture war over parents’ involvement in their children’s classrooms.
As a result of the parental notification repeal and other reforms, Illinois is now one of the safest places for pregnant people seeking abortion care across the country. “The timing of it is really incredible because now Illinois is becoming a haven for people from all over the South and Midwest who need abortion,” Mariappuram, of Jane’s Due Process, said. “But it’s also going to be a haven for youth.”
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Immigrants and labor unions marched over the Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn to City Hall Park, where they met with public officials in support of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a twelve-day cross-country trip taken by one thousand immigrants on eighteen buses. (photo: Ramin Talaie/Corbis/Getty Images)
In recent decades, most of the labor movement has taken strong stances in favor of immigrant rights. But unions could do more to stop the ongoing criminalization of immigration that Democrats are doing little to halt.
While the Biden-Harris administration ended some of the former administration’s cruel immigration policies, too many anti-immigrant policies remain: under the Joe Biden administration, the number of immigrants detained by ICE has increased from a daily average of 15,100 in January to 27,023 in March. Even though Biden made campaign promises to end for-profit detention, only two contracts have been terminated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers even as the COVID pandemic worsened the conditions of detained people who were left with few choices to protect themselves.
Given the realities of criminal branding, detention, and deportation, labor unions should continue to advocate for legalization while also challenging the hypercriminalization of immigration — a defining feature of the contemporary immigration enforcement system.
Between Solidarity and Exclusion
Labor’s history is riddled with deep divisions over immigration: some unions and labor federations organized immigrants into their ranks and supported legislation to expand immigrant rights, while others pushed for exclusionary immigration laws. Unions’ restrictive positions often stemmed from xenophobia coupled with ideas that immigrant workers would undermine labor’s position with an increased labor supply. Other progressive and left unions extended their sense of solidarity to immigrants, viewing organizing immigrant workers as key to uplifting labor standards for all.
Organized labor successfully lobbied for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first immigration law that excluded immigrants based on race and class. The law specifically barred Chinese laborers, who unions believed would destabilize labor market conditions with an increased labor supply and hinder their ability to reform working conditions. At the turn of the twentieth century, the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) anti-immigrant policies were extended to Southern and Eastern European immigrants.
The AFL’s president, Samuel Gompers — an immigrant himself, from Britain — supported the Immigration Restriction League’s literacy test for immigrants in efforts to reduce the number of “unskilled” Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Gompers argued that Southern and Eastern European immigrants would empower industrialists to undermine craft unions by replacing craft skill with machine labor.
Meanwhile, labor’s radical elements saw organizing immigrants as a source of strength for the movement. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized the 1912 “Bread and Roses” Lawrence textile strike where thousands of immigrant workers from various countries participated, more than half of whom were women. The strike began when workers at textile mills received a pay cut when they were already barely surviving. As a result of the solidarity sustained across racial lines, they won wage increases and overtime pay.
While for some, the Lawrence textile strike illustrated how immigrant and ethnic solidarity strengthens the working class’s ability to challenge their employers and improve working conditions, many established leaders within the AFL continued to imagine immigrants as threats to the interests of organized labor. With the AFL’s unabated support for restriction, the 1924 Immigration Act was passed by Congress. The 1924 law established the highest quotas for Northern and Wetern Europe and lower quotas for Southern and Eastern Europe. As historian Mae Ngai has explained, the law prohibited all immigration from Asia and Africa, explicitly etching racial exclusion into immigration law.
But despite the AFL’s efforts, organized labor was never uniformly restrictionist. In 1935 the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) was formed by several unions within the AFL to encourage organizing in mass production industries — where immigrants were heavily represented. The AFL had been uninterested in providing resources to organize industrial unions due to its exclusive focus on trade autonomy. As a result, the CIO organized itself into a separate national federation (the Congress of Industrial Organizations) in 1937.
The CIO was instrumental in providing organization and a pathway to inclusion for millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who occupied unorganized industries. Growing into a strongly pro-immigrant organization, the CIO critiqued the racially biased national-origins quota system and joined progressive organizations during World War II to advocate for the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill that would have allowed 20,000 refugee children to enter the United States.
Postwar, the AFL and the CIO extended their solidarity to displaced persons in Europe by joining the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons (CCDP), an organization of academics, religious leaders, and public officials that lobbied for legislation and played a role in the passage of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which authorized the entry of 200,000 refugees displaced by the war.
And with the merging of the AFL and the more progressive CIO in 1955, organized labor slowly began to shift its position on the racially biased national-origins quota system, eventually calling for the law’s eradication. Propelled in part by the civil rights movement, human rights groups, and organized labor, Congress abolished the 1924 Immigration Act and enacted the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
The Immigration and Nationality Act rightfully eradicated the racially discriminatory quota system that allocated visas based on national origin, established a preference system based on family reunification and professional status, and set visa restrictions that were equally allocated among countries. For the first time, however, the 1965 immigration law set numerical restrictions for legal immigration from the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico. These numerical restrictions — set at 20,000 for Mexico — were well below the more than 400,000 immigrants and temporary workers who had been admitted each year in the decade before 1965.
Considering that migratory flows from Mexico to the United States were long established through guest worker programs and increasing economic integration between the two economies, the new law moved Mexican immigration to more clandestine avenues and led to the growth of unauthorized immigration. This resulted in increased border policing and apprehensions along the US-Mexico border, giving rise to “illegal migration.”
As immigration became an increasingly salient political issue, and as the farmworker movement in the 1970s contended with growers using undocumented workers as strikebreakers, the AFL-CIO resolved to push for employer sanctions as a means to curb immigration. The AFL-CIO’s efforts made their way into the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, which included employer sanctions and a guest worker program and set up amnesty for immigrants who had been in the country prior to 1982.
Neoliberalism and Immigrant Labor Organizing
The proceeding decades of neoliberal economic restructuring were particularly challenging for labor unions. Deregulation, subcontracting, and efforts to weaken labor unions resulted in a steady decline in union membership and rising inequality. The sociologist Ruth Milkman has argued that the proliferation of low-wage work and employers’ search for new sources of labor contributed to mass migration. Within this context of an influx of immigration from the 1980s to 2000s and worker exploitation, immigrant workers began to organize — and gave a jolt to the largely moribund labor movement.
The courageous and successful movements of immigrant workers like the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles in the 1990s as well as the hotel organizing drives of the 1980s and 1990s pushed union leaders to reevaluate their restrictive immigration policies. Some of the organizers who played a central role in organizing immigrant workers during this time period, like Eliseo Medina, had received training from their previous careers with the United Farm Workers (UFW) and made advocating for immigrant rights within the AFL-CIO a priority.
After having successfully organized immigrant workers with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Southern California, Medina was eventually elected vice president of SEIU. As vice president, one of Medina’s main objectives was to shift the AFL-CIO’s position on immigration restriction. After discussing his vision for immigrant solidarity with the leadership of various unions including UNITE HERE and the UFW, and responding to the grassroots pressure of the membership of various unions, a coalition of unions presented a resolution at the 1999 AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles in support of immigrant rights. In February 2000, the AFL-CIO reversed its position on employer sanctions and instead called for protection of workplace rights and amnesty for immigrants.
Crimmigration (1980s–Present): The Convergence of the Criminal Legal System and Immigration System
Before the AFL-CIO resolved to stand by immigrants in 2000 by pushing for immigration reform and protection of workplace rights, new developments had taken shape within the immigration system in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1980s — alongside heightened talk of immigrant criminality, neoliberal economic policies, and the buildup of the mass incarceration system — immigration law and criminal law began to converge and evolved to shape the contemporary immigration enforcement system, what some call “crimmigration.”
As the legal scholar César Cuauhtémoc García has explained, this convergence has occurred through three primary trends. The first is that immigration violations, like illegal entry and reentry, are increasingly punished through the criminal legal system: according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, arrests for immigration-related violations increased from 20,942 in 1998 to 108,667 in 2018. In 2018, immigration offenses accounted for 31.4 percent of federal prosecutions — the largest share of any crime prosecuted in federal courts.
Second, the list of crimes that could lead to immigration law consequences like deportation has steadily expanded since the 1980s. These offenses now include misdemeanors like altering a passport.
And law enforcement that has historically operated separately, through either the criminal legal system or immigration system, has transgressed those boundaries, so that now state and local law enforcement agencies are sometimes enlisted in enforcing federal immigration laws through Section 287(g), passed as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.
Through bipartisan support, the criminalization of immigration has led to the imprisonment, by ICE or the federal criminal legal system, of close to half a million immigrants per year and millions of deportations.
Solidarity: Contesting the Criminalization of Immigration
Since reversing course and officially changing their position in 2000, the AFL-CIO has extended its solidarity toward immigrants. In 2003, unions and immigrant rights groups organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, visiting more than a hundred cities to rally for immigrant rights. Unions across the United States have organized and turned out their members for the megamarches that took place in 2006 and have become some of the most visible and consistent advocates for immigration reform.
Many unions have negotiated immigration language in their contracts, protecting against unnecessary document checks and requiring employers to contact the union in the event of immigration enforcement activities. The AFL-CIO has made a tool kit to assist organizers and advocates in the case of workplace raids and has rightly linked immigration reform with uplifting labor standards. Unions like the Chicago Teachers Union have organized to expand sanctuary for immigrants, while the California Nurses Association passed a resolution condemning deportation, pointing to detrimental health implications for immigrants and their families.
In addition to unions declaring themselves sanctuary unions and advocating for legalization, the labor movement must contest the practices of detention and deportation. For example, organizations like the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON) — a network of worker centers organizing day laborers — have challenged ICE’s ability to detain from the criminal legal system and have organized to strategically push ICE out of communities in California.
Organized labor must also look inward and reckon with the unions that represent Border Patrol and ICE agents, like the National ICE Council and the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which endorsed Donald Trump and his draconian immigration policies. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), an AFL-CIO affiliate, charters these two unions.
Throughout labor’s history, unions and their federations have influenced immigration law and policy. At times, unions called for restriction that caused antagonism within the working class. Other unions extended their solidarity by organizing immigrants into their ranks and advocated for their political and labor rights. These unions understood that exclusion creates a class of more exploitable workers who are used to divide and weaken the working class.
A brief overview of organized labor’s history illustrates that unions have not only fostered pathways to inclusion for immigrants but have advocated for the expansion of their rights. As in the past, the path forward is one of mutual solidarity. Today this includes challenging the laws and policies that lead to the exclusion and exploitation of undocumented immigrants.
People deliver supply packages for relatives who were jailed during the state of emergency at the security perimeter of the Izalco prison in El Salvador, on May 27. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
Thousands have been arrested since the country suspended certain civil liberties amid a crackdown on gangs.
“The car brought us the news that he had died,” the young man’s father, Saul Sandoval, told Al Jazeera.
Authorities told the family that he had been in the process of being transferred from a jail cell in Ahuachapan to Izalco prison in Sonsonate, but he fainted and died before entering. According to a medical report reviewed by Al Jazeera, the cause of death was “chest trauma”. Photos of the body show deep cuts and bruises on his arms and around his knees.
“If he fainted, our question is: Where did all the injuries that he has come from?” Sandoval asked.
His son is among at least 40 inmates who have died in state custody since El Salvador on March 27 imposed a state of exception suspending certain civil liberties, according to data from Amnesty International shared with Al Jazeera.
More than 40,000 people have since been arrested. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele called for the emergency measures as part of a crackdown on gangs, following a surge in homicides that left more than 80 people dead in a single March weekend.
Human rights groups say the policy has led to widespread human rights abuses, including deaths in state care as the already overpopulated prison system has extended even further past its breaking point.
“The stories coming out of the prisons are really dire,” Arjun Chaudhuri, a campaigner for Mexico and Central America with Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera. “There is no real access to basic human needs, like food or medical care, and there is also violence being exercised within the prisons. It paints a very bleak picture.”
This is a clear violation of the state’s responsibility to protect the inmates in its care, he added.
Inhumane tactics
The Salvadoran human rights organisation Cristosal says at least 14 in-custody deaths during the state of exception can be categorised as extrajudicial killings, due to evidence of violence or a lack of medical attention.
In the case of Walter Vladimir Sandoval Penate, witnesses said police beat the young man after he denied being a gang member, according to local media. His father said he had no gang ties.
Later in April, 37-year-old Mauricio Alberto Flores Sorto reportedly died after staff at the Izalco prison did not provide him with necessary medications for hypertension and anxiety. And on May 10, Carlos Wilfredo Sauceda Gonzalez and Sergio Alcides Natividad Calzadilla died in La Esperanza prison after having been beaten, Cristosal found.
El Salvador already had one of the highest imprisonment rates per capita in the world before the state of exception began, second only to the United States, according to the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative. In 2020, El Salvador’s prison system was about 35 percent over its maximum capacity of about 27,000 inmates, according to the World Prison Brief database. And the government’s inhumane prison enforcement tactics, which have included parading barely dressed inmates in front of cameras, had already gained scrutiny from human rights groups.
Overcrowding and poor prison conditions are common throughout Latin America’s prisons, according to Juan Pappier, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who has been documenting arbitrary detentions during El Salvador’s state of exception.
“El Salvador has among the worst records in the region in terms of prison overcrowding,” Pappier told Al Jazeera. “And the mass arrests conducted during the state of emergency are only making it worse and worse.”
‘Affront to human dignity’
In recent weeks, Amnesty International has documented conditions that Chaudhuri calls an “affront to human dignity”, including rotting food, meals being rationed and shared among inmates, and a lack of hygiene products such as soap and toilet paper. One person who was imprisoned and later released lost 20 kilogrammes in less than three weeks, he said, while medicine and access to doctors have been either non-existent or extremely limited.
Amnesty, which based its findings on interviews with former prisoners and the families of those who died in custody, has also documented a pattern of prison violence, perpetrated by both gangs and authorities. In one case, a 16-year-old boy told Amnesty that gang members regularly beat him; one day, they threw a bag of urine at him. He said prison guards saw all of this, but did nothing.
“What we’ve heard from people who have been released is that gang members are in control of prisons,” Chaudhuri said. “They decide when people eat, when people use the bathrooms, when people shower, all of these decisions – and they also exercise violence over prisoners who have been arbitrarily detained and don’t necessarily form part of any sort of gang structures.”
Current prison conditions seem to be “part of a deliberate state policy of punishing people the state claims are part of gangs”, he added. But Amnesty and other rights groups have documented that many of the Salvadorans arrested are not part of gangs, and have been arbitrarily imprisoned.
In a speech in April shortly after the state of exception began, Bukele threatened to withhold meals for inmates, saying: “I don’t care what the international organisations say. Come and protect our people. Come and take the gang members if they love them so much.” Neither the president’s office nor the country’s prisons bureau responded to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
According to Chaudhuri, authorities have not been forthcoming with families about the circumstances of their relatives’ deaths, potentially violating UN rules on prisoner treatment, which require authorities to immediately inform next of kin of a prisoner’s death and to “conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into the circumstances and causes”.
For Sandoval, the lack of information from authorities on his son’s case weighs heavily on the family: “We’re still looking for answers,” he said, noting that if they can’t rely on prison authorities, he will continue the search himself. “We want to investigate this case.”
A customer shops for glyphosate products in California. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
Environmental groups had challenged the Trump administration’s 2020 interim registration for the chemical, which concluded that it did not cause cancer in humans or harm wildlife.
“Today’s decision gives voice to those who suffer from glyphosate’s cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” Center for Food Safety senior attorney and lead counsel on the case Amy van Saun said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “EPA’s ‘no cancer’ risk conclusion did not stand up to scrutiny. Today is a major victory for farmworkers and others exposed to glyphosate. Imperiled wildlife also won today, as the court agreed that EPA needed to ensure the safety of endangered species before greenlighting glyphosate.”
BREAKING! In a historic victory for #farmworkers & the environment, a federal court has sided with CFS & allies, overturning #EPA's decision that the toxic pesticide #glyphosate poses no cancer risks and sending EPA back to redo its environmental analysis. https://t.co/TRzS8yidZY
— Center 4 Food Safety (@CFSTrueFood) June 17, 2022
Roundup is the most widely used herbicide in the world, according to AP News. First developed by Monsanto, its ownership passed to Bayer in 2018. However, there is concern that the popular pesticide causes serious harm to the people who use it. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer ruled that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic,” and Bayer faces thousands of lawsuits from people claiming that Roundup use caused them to develop cancer.
The current lawsuit, brought by the Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides, Farmworker Association of Florida, Rural Coalition and Organización en California de Líderes Campesinas, challenged the EPA’s decision on two grounds. First, the groups disagreed that glyphosate does not cause cancer and second, they disagreed that it does not harm endangered species.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs that “the EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act.”
The court ruled that the EPA’s determination that glyphosate was “not likely to cause cancer” ignored evidence and the agency’s own Cancer Guidelines, the Center for Food Safety said. Further, its conclusion that the chemical did not threaten endangered species ignored the agency’s own admission that glyphosate “may affect” all 1,795 endangered or threatened species that are exposed to it. The court therefore tossed out the EPA’s human health assessment and gave the agency a deadline of October 2022 to finish or do over all remaining glyphosate assessments including the ecological toxicity assessment, the assessment of impacts on farmers and the Endangered Species assessment.
“We are grateful that the court decided in our favor,” Rural Coalition chairperson John Zippert said in the statement emailed to EcoWatch. “We need to halt glyphosate’s devastating impact on the farmworkers and farmers who suffer the deepest consequences of exposure. This decision will hopefully hasten the transition to farming and gardening methods and practices that increase resilience, protecting our children, our planet, and all those who feed us.”
In response, the EPA said it would review the decision, as Reuters reported.
Bayer, meanwhile, maintained that the EPA’s 2020 decision “was based on a rigorous assessment of the extensive body of science spanning more than 40 years,” as AP News reported. It added that it believed the agency “will continue to conclude, as it and other regulators have consistently concluded for more than four decades, that glyphosate-based herbicides can be used safely and are not carcinogenic.”
Bayer has already settled around 95,000 glyphosate lawsuits for more than $10 billion and announced that it will stop selling glyphosate products to the U.S. home and garden market beginning in 2023.
However, there is a petition pending before the Supreme Court to overturn a jury decision that granted $25 million to a California resident who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after years of Roundup use, as E&E News reported. The Supreme Court could either accept or refuse the petition in the coming weeks, which could impact future glyphosate lawsuits. The EPA has asked the court not to get involved.
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