13 July 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
They will still have to make some time in their schedule to make their court dates, it seems.
For example, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago had one of his family blatherfests scheduled for North Carolina. Both the little princes were supposed to speak, as well as their sister, plus assorted other hangers-on. However, it seems that many of them had a previous engagement in New York. From the Raleigh News & Observer:
News of the cancellation comes as Axios reports Trump, his son, Donald Trump Jr., and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, have been scheduled to testify under oath Friday in an investigation into Trump's finances. The American Freedom Tour had announced in May appearances in Greensboro by Trump, Trump Jr., television news personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, former New York state judge Jeanine Pirro, Pinal County (Arizona) Sheriff Mark Lamb and political commentator Dinesh D'Souza. The American Freedom Tour did not publicize that the event would no longer take place Friday, but quietly removed it from its website. Tickets for the event initially sold for $9 to $3,955. The News & Observer requested further information and received a generic response. "We are very sorry that due to unforeseen circumstances we are rescheduling the American Freedom Tour stop in Greensboro, NC," an emailed reply stated. "Your ticket may be used at any American Freedom Tour event in America."
"Unforeseen" is laboring hard and fruitlessly in that sentence right there. Sorry, Biff and Family, you have a date with a grand jury.
And then there's Senator Huckleberry down there in South Carolina, who tried to slither out from under a subpoena to testify before Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' special grand jury that's looking into how the previous president* and his loyal band of ratfuckers tried to hijack the vote in Georgia. A Fulton County judge caught him, however, and explained how he—the judge, that is—had not arrived at the courthouse on a load of rutabagas. From WSB-Atlanta:
That new order says the grand jury needs to hear about [Sen. Lindsey] Graham's two alleged phone calls to Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. In the order, Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney said the "court finds that Lindsey Graham is a necessary and material witness" in the special grand jury's investigation into potential criminal interference in Georgia's 2020 election. The new order also requires Graham to come testify in August […] the new order said the grand jury wants to find out more about two phone calls allegedly made by Graham to Raffensperger asking him to begin "reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump."
Sorry, gang, your MAGA hat won't get you into heaven anymore.
Members of the media wait for the arrival of Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, before the sixth public hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee on June 28. (photo: Shawn Thew/Getty)
If Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he once joked he could, would all those prosecutors still struggle to indict him?
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, he bragged while campaigning in Iowa back in 2016.
Never mind the voters. Here we are, 18 months after his presidency, staring at clear evidence that Trump led a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the 2020 election and the constitutional duties of Congress. He intentionally incited a violent mob that he knew was armed to mount an attempted coup on Capitol Hill.
He knew from his own lawyers’ opposition to his many crackpot schemes that he was breaking the law.
But the US justice department has apparently only just begun to grapple with the debate over whether they can even investigate the former president.
You have to wonder: if Trump did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, would all those prosecutors still be struggling with the question of whether they could or should indict him?
If you think that’s a ridiculous question, you should ask yourself where the line is drawn for prosecution short of murder. The insurrectionists beat a police officer over the head with a metal bar: doesn’t that count as attempted murder?
What we already know from Tuesday’s House hearings into the January 6 insurrection is that Trump’s participation in the assault on Congress was critical and intentional. It led directly to violence. Trump’s closest aides believed his conduct was reckless, baseless and lawless.
But we kind of knew that at the time, because he said it all on stage and social media. The goons of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers had to find out somehow, and that meant it all took place in the open. But that doesn’t make it any less criminal.
What we have here is not so much a smoking gun but a blazing inferno that used to be an armory.
Hell, the former president is still apparently trying to tamper with witnesses to stop them snitching on his obviously criminal behavior.
You don’t have to be a federal prosecutor to know that the standard for criminal conviction is beyond reasonable doubt.
Is it reasonable to think that Donald Trump understood the effects of inciting an armed mob to come to a protest that he promised would be wild?
Is it reasonable to think that his incitement was intentional just after an unhinged meeting in the West Wing about overturning the election he had just lost?
Is it reasonable to think that violence and interfering with an election might take place after he urged the mob to go to the Capitol alongside him?
It is obviously beyond reasonable doubt. And it is certainly worth putting to a jury to decide for themselves.
Don’t take my word for it. According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 69% of Americans think Trump bears some responsibility for the attack on police at the Capitol.
Even Brad Parscale, Trump’s own campaign manager, believed Trump had blood on his hands.
What is not reasonable is the current position of the justice department. It’s not at all clear why a former president, who is now a private citizen, lives in some kind of protective bubble that prevents criminal investigation and charges.
According to the New York Times, the justice department was only prodded into “discussing the topic of Mr Trump more directly” because of the recent testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
This is a wonderful turn of events. The topic of Mr Trump must be a fascinating discussion in the corridors of prosecutorial power.
Until now, they have been immersed in what they call a “bottom up” approach of snagging the lower level criminals before moving on to the higher-ups, some time in the Ron DeSantis administration.
This awesome legal strategy is presumably not in keeping with the nation’s long-running efforts to fight organized crime or drug cartels. Otherwise they would be jailing street dealers and getaway drivers until the end of time.
Attorney general Merrick Garland insists that the justice department investigates crimes, not people. There is a legal term for this argument, in the context of a conspiracy to commit serious crimes. It approximates to the excrement of male bovines.
The justice department has previously decided that it cannot prosecute a sitting president – not for legal reasons but for logical ones. At some point, the president can intervene to stop his own prosecution so any case will ultimately collapse.
But that’s not the case with Trump. Past presidents don’t run the justice department. They don’t have constitutional protections beyond those of any citizen.
You may acknowledge that no justice department wants to pursue politically charged investigations. But that is a political decision, not a legal one.
Trump’s post-election conduct – pressuring state election officials to find fraudulent votes, plotting to organize fake state electors, inciting a violent mob to storm the Capitol – is so egregiously, obviously beyond the bounds of normal political conduct.
If the current justice department cannot understand that – if it cannot understand how criminal acts are defined and what reasonable doubt looks like – then it has no reason to exist.
Its entire purpose is to enforce the laws, and in this case the laws are designed to protect democracy.
This isn’t a hard call. And it shouldn’t take a congressional committee to prod them out of their sanctimonious slumber.
Almost a century ago, on Valentine’s Day of 1929, there was a massacre of mobsters in Chicago by a gang armed with machine guns who were pretending to serve as police officers. Their leader was sunning himself in Florida, where some criminal masterminds like to spend their down time.
Al Capone was not prosecuted and jailed for his hand in the Valentine’s Day massacre. He was jailed for tax evasion, after refusing a subpoena to appear before a grand jury.
Back in the early days of law enforcement, they could see the importance of investigating both the crimes and the people.
There is just one principle more important than the attorney general’s high-minded approach to the sanctity of prosecutorial power. It’s called defending democracy.
If he doesn’t want to uphold the laws that protect the republic, he should step aside and let someone else do the job.
White House national security adviser John Bolton arrives to speak about the political unrest in Venezuela after violence broke out at anti-government protests near Caracas, outside the White House in Washington, U.S., April 30, 2019. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Bolton made the remarks to CNN after the day's congressional hearing into the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The panel's lawmakers on Tuesday accused former President Donald Trump of inciting the violence in a last-ditch bid to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.
Speaking to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, however, Bolton suggested Trump was not competent enough to pull off a "carefully planned coup d'etat," later adding: "As somebody who has helped plan coups d'etat - not here but you know (in) other places - it takes a lot of work. And that's not what he (Trump) did."
Tapper asked Bolton which attempts he was referring to.
"I'm not going to get into the specifics," Bolton said, before mentioning Venezuela. "It turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president and they failed," he said.
In 2019, Bolton as national security adviser publicly supported Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido's call for the military to back his effort to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro, arguing that Maduro's re-election was illegitimate. Ultimately Maduro remained in power.
"I feel like there's other stuff you're not telling me (beyond Venezuela)," the CNN anchor said, prompting a reply from Bolton: "I'm sure there is."
Many foreign policy experts have over the years criticized Washington's history of interventions in other countries, from its role in the 1953 overthrowing of then Iranian nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the Vietnam war, to its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan this century.
But it is highly unusual for U.S. officials to openly acknowledge their role in stoking unrest in foreign countries.
"John Bolton, who's served in highest positions in the U.S. government, including UN ambassador, casually boasting about he's helped plan coups in other countries," Dickens Olewe, a BBC journalist from Kenya, wrote on Twitter.
JOHN BOLTON was an INTERIM APPOINTMENT as UN Ambassador because a Republican Senate would NOT confirm him.
That defines what was widely known about John Bolton at the time.
When tRump appointed him it was to a position that did NOT require Senate approval.
Who promoted and supported John Bolton? Wasn't it MERCERS?
John Bolton is among the original Chicken Hawk co-founders of PNAC (Project for the New American Century - about creating American Empire).
Women demonstrate against New York state abortion laws in Manhattan on March 28, 1970. (photo: Hulton Archive/Getty)
If you’re wondering how we got here, look to Black women’s long fight for reproductive justice.
The reproductive coercion of Black women is a thread running through American history, one that predated and presaged the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs that overturned Roe v. Wade. Enslaved Black women were forced into pregnancy to help build America’s budding economy. Pregnant Black moms are criminalized or excluded from abortion on the basis of poverty. The state takes away Black children from Black mothers at a disproportionate rate.
Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts chronicled this history in her seminal book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Roberts defines reproductive justice as the human right not to have a child; the right to have a child; and the right to parent your child in a supportive, humane, and just society. Her latest book is Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.
For Roberts, reproductive rights and the fight for abortion access shouldn’t just be about the existence of a choice, but about the right to live in a society that allows for the freedom to make it. “Just having a legal choice that you don’t have the means to effectuate is not true freedom,” Roberts told me.
I reached out to Roberts to talk about the key moments throughout history, like the passage of the Hyde Amendment — barring federal funds from paying for abortions — that suggested abortion rights were never fully secure. We talk about why adoption is not and has never been a solution to inequality, why Black women have historically used abortion as resistance, and why American history is a better source of analogies than The Handmaid’s Tale. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fabiola Cineas
As someone who has studied the historic fight for reproductive justice, particularly through what Black women have experienced, what was your reaction when you saw the leaked draft opinion in May and then when the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe in June?
Dorothy Roberts
I can’t tell you how many panels I’ve been on over the last couple of decades where the issue was what to do in the post-Roe world. So there was a lot of preparation for it, but I was still shaken by it. I happened to be with my daughter and her two best friends — they’re all in their 30s — and my thought was, “My goodness, they have fewer rights to autonomy over their bodies than I did at their age.” When I was their age, I thought that I had good control over my body.
At the same time, though, there’s a reproductive justice movement that’s so much stronger than it was when I was their age. We are in a contradictory time because with the fight for justice, it seems like we’re going backward while at the same time building movements that are so much further than we were when we were growing up.
Fabiola Cineas
You had more autonomy over your body in the past than your daughters do now. But was there something you observed back then that suggested that reproductive rights were not actually secure?
Dorothy Roberts
I could see that even though we were legally protected from government laws that barred abortion, there was no legal right to demand government support for abortions due to the Hyde Amendment. So we had the legal right to an abortion, but it excluded funding for women who were poor. This was all happening while there was a bipartisan effort to end the federal entitlement to welfare. Plus, in the late 1980s, I watched the prosecutions of Black women for being pregnant and using drugs.
Those two aspects of reproductive regulation, which disproportionately affected Black women, made me think the fight wasn’t over.
The advocacy around abortion was focused mostly on the framework of being able to make a choice, without taking into account these structural impediments to having reproductive freedom.
It also didn’t take into full account the devaluation of Black women’s childbearing and the punitive policies surrounding it. I was an advocate for abortion rights, but I was more concerned about the failure to advocate with the same force for the human rights of impoverished people, or Black people and other people of color in the United States. Once I started thinking about the Hyde Amendment and the prosecutions of Black women who were pregnant and using drugs, I began to see a whole host of reproductive violations that weren’t at the forefront of the mainstream reproductive rights movement. That really changed the narrative about progress toward reproductive freedom in America.
I can see today how those infringements of human rights are coming together to create the moment we’re in now, where pregnancy is criminalized and where we are going to see the arrests and incarceration of people who manage their pregnancies, have miscarriages, or have stillbirths. They’re all going to be punished under one agenda of controlling women’s autonomy over their bodies and participation in society, and also punishing anyone who’s capable of being pregnant.
Fabiola Cineas
I’d like to back up then. It sounds like there’s almost a straight line from the 17th century to now that has long told us that these rights were never fully secure. And it sounds like it is specifically bound up in a struggle that Black women have faced for reproductive freedom. Can you walk me through some key historical moments that you think speak directly to the Supreme Court’s decision and the ensuing trigger bans?
Dorothy Roberts
I’d first go back to the institution of slavery to look at the connection between reproduction and bondage. The experiences of the enslaved Black woman and the exploitation of Black women’s labor were foundational to the state regulation of reproduction in America.
It still is staggering to me when I think about the very first laws in the colonies that were so directed at regulating Black women’s sexuality and reproduction, and how that reverberates today.
Black women, during the slavery era, resisted control of their bodies, including by having abortions. Abortion has been a means of resistance for Black women in the same way that exploiting Black women’s reproductive labor has been a form of racial and gender oppression from the very founding of this nation.
That was an aspect of the history of reproductive policy and rights in the United States that I didn’t think was getting enough attention. I don’t think you can understand where we are today without taking into account the historic regulation of Black women’s childbearing, which has its roots in enslavement.
Fabiola Cineas
And what would you highlight next?
Dorothy Roberts
After the Civil War, white supremacists who wanted to take back control of the South, enforce white domination, and effectively re-enslave Black people used the apprenticeship system to violently capture and take control of Black children again by exploiting their labor against the will of their parents. In many of the narratives about this, Black mothers describe how they fought to get their children back. To me, that system is the root of our current child welfare system, or what I call a family policing system, that also disproportionately tears apart Black families and is especially punitive to Black mothers.
I would also highlight the activism of Black women, demanding welfare rights and government funding for their childbearing decisions and for the care of their children. Because Black women were successful at being included in welfare programs, the state reacted by making those programs more punitive and vilifying, eventually leading up to the abolition of the federal entitlement to welfare. This was fueled by the myth of the Black welfare queen. So there’s that.
Fabiola Cineas
What else stands out to you?
Dorothy Roberts
The way in which prosecutors and policymakers turned drug use during pregnancy from a health care issue into a crime, with the prosecutions of Black women who are pregnant and smoked crack cocaine in the 1980s. I see that as the beginning of this latest chapter of the right-wing criminalization of pregnancy.
This is the chapter in which they criminalize pregnant people who don’t produce a healthy baby, whether it’s by abortion or by alleged behaviors during pregnancy that are seen to risk a fetus. That strategy begins with the prosecutions of Black women and also the taking of their newborns. And that is a prelude to what is happening today.
Fabiola Cineas
And how have things shifted to what we are seeing today?
Dorothy Roberts
One way in which the conditions now are different from when Roe was decided [in 1973] is that we have medication abortion and it’s easier for people to self-manage their abortions. But on the other hand, we have this buildup of criminalizing pregnancy with fetal protection laws, prosecutors prosecuting and getting convictions of women who have stillbirths. We see the arrest of women who had self-managed abortions prior to the Dobbs decision. That foreshadows a future where women and girls and people who are capable of pregnancy are going to be arrested and incarcerated for pregnancy outcomes. So again, criminalizing pregnancy whether you want to have a child or you want to terminate the pregnancy — those prosecutions are a pivotal point in the story of how we got to where we are today, and how Black women were both targeted and fought back again.
During a period in the 1990s, Black feminists got together and developed the framework of reproductive justice. That’s certainly another key moment — though, of course, we can also go back to enslaved women who started this work, and the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s that wrote about interlocking systems of oppression and how Black women’s position in society is oppositional to white male rule.
So the crafting of reproductive justice analysis is built on that history that recognizes the human right to not have a child but also to have a child, and to parent a child in a nurturing and supportive and just and humane society. That looks beyond the question of whether there is a legal choice to look at the societal conditions that allow people to actually exercise true reproductive freedom and autonomy.
Fabiola Cineas
You’ve said that forced pregnancy and family separation — taking children away from their parents through the child welfare system — are connected and that understanding this connection is key to understanding the struggle for reproductive justice. How are they connected?
Dorothy Roberts
One way that we can see they are connected forms of state violence is that the right is arguing that adoption is the solution to both of them. And, unfortunately, some liberal people are also arguing for adoption as a solution to the struggles of families who are feeling the brunt of an inequitable society. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing adoption thrown around as the solution to what really is state violence and state oppression.
Fabiola Cineas
Yeah, I’ve been seeing what looks like mostly white or foreign couples or white women holding up signs that say, “We will adopt your baby.” Yet when asked if they actually will, the answer seems to be, “No.” What is this about?
Dorothy Roberts
Compelling pregnancy and taking people’s children away from them are both ways of upholding a system of white male elite rule where you divert attention away from structural inequities that need to be demolished and replaced and point to private mechanisms, which is what adoption is.
In the case of family separation, we have a family policing system that instead of helping families, blames family caregivers — especially Black family caregivers — and relies on taking children away. To me, that is a neoliberal form of privatizing issues. Instead of a society that supports families’ needs, it turns to private citizens taking children and claiming them for their own. That is exactly the same response of a regime that now wants to force people to carry pregnancies to term. They turn to this private response of adoption in place of facing the fact that one of the main reasons that people have abortions is because they don’t have the means at that time to take care of children.
For state legislators and the Supreme Court justices to pretend that adoption is going to take care of it is just blatant mendacity.
Every aspect of that is just false — there’s not going to be enough people to adopt all of the children whose needs cannot be met because of poverty in this nation, because of the structural racism, because of discrimination against women. Children will either grow up in families that don’t have the means to meet all of their needs on their own, or they’re going to go into a dangerous and harmful foster system.
It’s all about blaming people who are unable to meet children’s needs. It’s about denying them freedom to make decisions for themselves and then punishing them for whatever outcomes befall their children. Under this regime, they include the fetuses where there isn’t a healthy baby.
Fabiola Cineas
This also sounds connected to the idea that abortion for Black women is a form of genocide, an idea that’s been repeated for a long time. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has even cited this idea.
Dorothy Roberts
Yes, this is also related to the false accusation that abortion is a form of genocide that Black mothers are complicit in. Abortion hasn’t been used historically as a form of controlling Black reproduction. Sterilization has. There’s a big difference between forcible sterilization and upholding the human rights to control your body and not be compelled to be pregnant. Those are two radically different things. One is about compulsion and unfreedom. The other is about freedom and resisting compulsion. Those aren’t the same thing.
Clarence Thomas is just wrong. And so are others like him who say that abortion is a tool of Black genocide and that Black women are participating in the destruction of the Black community when they have abortions. And they refer to the eugenics era as a historical reference. That’s just false.
The historical reference is compelled sterilization of Black women, which is akin to compelled pregnancy. They’ve got the references all screwed up when they make that argument. The billboards that went up [10 years ago] to shame Black women for abortion that said, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb” — that message supports sterilizing Black women, as well as compelling pregnancies. It’s a message about reproductive control. It’s a false message that isn’t about any kind of liberation for Black people.
Fabiola Cineas
And is this another reason why some people claim that abortion still feels like a “white woman” issue?
Dorothy Roberts
I’ve heard that, too, believe me. At the time when the Webster decision was being considered and we thought that Roe might be overturned, I was speaking about it at a church and a Black man came up to me and said, “That’s a white woman’s issue. Why are you talking about it?” And there is a history of some Black nationalists chiding Black women for any kind of family planning, contraceptives, or abortion. It’s just ridiculous to say it’s a white woman’s issue when Black women are more likely to seek and have abortions.
Black women have been advocating for reproductive freedom for just as long as white women have been. We have included the right to abortion in our fight, but it’s just that we haven’t focused on it since we recognize that sterilization, abuse, and being prosecuted for having babies, and Black maternal mortality, and so many other issues involving our reproductive lives are equally as important.
There’s a long history of Black women advocating for abortion rights. Loretta Ross has been advocating for abortion rights for decades. Shirley Chisholm, in her autobiography and advocacy, championed abortion rights and spoke out against Black men who said that it was a white woman’s issue. Black women use abortion as a form of resistance against slavery.
It’s wrong to say that it’s a white woman’s issue. And it’s also wrong to say that it is a form of Black genocide. Those are false in terms of politics, history, in terms of what Black women have been advocating for for centuries. They’re anti-freedom. They’re anti-freedom, and they are inconsistent with the history of Black rebellion and abolition activism.
Fabiola Cineas
I also want to get your thoughts on The Handmaid’s Tale references and memes and the people who declared, “Welcome to The Handmaid’s Tale!” when the Supreme Court’s decision came down. This is the reference that seems to be the most widespread whenever women’s rights are on the line.
But lately some people have been pushing back, arguing that the meme erases the realities that marginalized groups of women have faced for centuries in America — America has already been a Gilead for Black women, for example. Why do you think The Handmaid’s Tale meme is still prevalent?
Dorothy Roberts
Mainstream US society has never taken full account of Black women’s lives and autonomy and imagination and vision. So the response to any current trend is often to look to white people as the victims and as the visionaries. But as I’ve been saying, Black women have been at the forefront of movements to both contest oppression and also reimagine a society that is more just and humane and caring and equal. I think that’s just one reason why we would get The Handmaid’s Tale before we get the very real history of Black women’s reproductive labor being exploited or Black women being compelled to be pregnant for the profit of white enslavers. It’s not an imagined story. It’s an actual history that continues to shape policy today.
There’s a big difference between saying this fictional dystopia is a metaphor for our reality and saying, let’s look at the real history of the reproductive violence against Black women and how it actually has shaped policy in the United States since the time of slavery until today.
It’s also prevalent because white people don’t have to grapple with the reality of how we got to the overturning of Roe. It is a result of the dehumanization of Black people, and it is a white backlash against every advance for liberation that Black people have made. It is a result of policies that have put Black women at the center.
It’s mind-boggling but so important to recognize that we can name all these moments of history where there’ve been these regressions in freedom, where stereotypes about Black women and policies geared at controlling Black women’s sexuality and childbearing have been at the center over and over again. One of the reasons for ignoring this is that it’s a way to skirt radical social change. It’s a way of pretending that America is built on principles of equality and liberty when you ignore the deep roots of inhumanity and slavery and coercion and punishment that are still critical to understanding where we are today.
Fabiola Cineas
As someone who’s examined and been a part of this fight for a long time, what gives you hope right now?
Dorothy Roberts
What gives me hope today that we can continue with a reproductive justice framework is fighting back against these assaults on our freedoms while building a radically different society that doesn’t rely on carceral approaches to meeting human needs. This means it doesn’t police people or force people into compelled pregnancy. It doesn’t take people’s children away from them as a way of meeting children’s needs. I see all of these carceral, punitive, inhumane approaches as part of a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist approach to meeting human needs. They’re all interconnected.
I find hope in the fact that we have a reproductive justice movement that has been active and flourishing. I’m also finding a lot of hope in the very quick action by abortion funds that are taking immediate steps to help people who need abortions.
Magdalena Tepaz and Maria Sipac Coj, mothers of 14-year-old Juan Tulul Tepaz and 13-year-old Pascual Guachiac Sipac, cousins who died along with other immigrants in San Antonio, hold pictures of their sons. (photo: Sandra Sebastian/Reuters)
"What the tragedy in San Antonio, Texas, reveals is something alarming," one expert said.
On Friday, the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office said all but one of the 53 immigrants who died in a sweltering tractor-trailer on the outskirts of San Antonio have been identified. Of the 45 names with demographic information the medical examiner’s office released on Friday, most were Mexican men who were hoping to make more money in the US to support their families.
Among them was Efrain Ferrel Garcia, a 22-year-old who was recently married; J. Marcial Trejo Hernandez, 38, who on Father's Day left his home to cross the border for the second time; José López Muñiz, who was also making his second journey to the US with the hopes of making more money to support his 3- and 7-year-old sons.
But also among the dead were six children. The deaths of two cousins, 13 and 14 years old, who were from an Indigenous Guatemalan community, have stood out to researchers and immigrant advocates because of how young they were.
Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, said the profile of most of the immigrants who died in the trailer matched what researchers normally see for people who travel in between official border crossings and hope to evade Border Patrol.
The two cousins from Guatemala, Pascual Guachiac Sipac and Juan Tulul Tepaz, don't fit the profile of the immigrants typically seen trying to evade US immigration authorities, Leutert said.
Non-Mexican immigrant children will often cross the border alone and present themselves to Border Patrol agents who then process them as unaccompanied minors. Unlike the majority of immigrants and asylum-seekers who are detained at the US–Mexico border, unaccompanied immigrant minors are put on a track that allows them to remain in the US and be released to a sponsor, usually a friend or family member.
"Not only would this be preferable because it’s safer since you don’t have to risk your life traveling in a tractor-trailer, around a checkpoint, or in the trunk of a car," Leutert said. "It's actually usually cheaper for those individuals as well."
It's not unheard of to see children that young take a more dangerous route such as the one Pascual and Juan took, but it's not common, Leutert said.
Despite the horrors the immigrants in this incident endured, the deaths are unlikely to deter the vast majority of people who want to make the trek to the US border, Leutert said. There's a difference between knowing the dangers that could befall someone on their journey to the US and thinking it could happen to you, Leutert said.
"Maybe some people out there will see this case and think, No, I don't want to do that, or a parent will say no," Leutert said. "For the majority of people, they are not viewing their migration as a fully voluntary decision but rather one they need to take whether due to violence, hunger, or the inability to live a prosperous and dignified life within their own community."
It's hard to know why the two teens went that route without more information from the family. It could be that the boys and their families didn't know presenting themselves as unaccompanied minors was an option, that the smugglers didn't tell them in an attempt to make more money, or they were traveling with an adult family member they didn't want to be separated from, Leutert said.
Rubén Figueroa, an immigrant rights activist who helps coordinate searches for those who go missing on their journey, said the two cousins were smuggled from their country of origin to the US in order to work there. This isn't an issue that should be dealt with from a border security perspective, Figueroa said, but rather a problem that countries of origin plagued by poverty, corruption, and violence must confront in order to avoid a tragedy like this.
"What the tragedy in San Antonio, Texas, reveals is something alarming," Figueroa said. "It's something society and politicians need to know, that boys and girls are being trafficked from Central America to the US in order to work in the country."
Pascual's grandmother told Al Jazeera that the 13-year-old had planned to reunite with his father, who had been in the US for a year, and continue his studies there.
“Our family is saddened by the loss,” Manuela Coj, the boy's grandmother, told Al Jazeera. “His dream was to finish his studies there in the United States. He wanted to leave a better future for his family members.”
The two boys were from the Indigenous Mayan K'iche’ community of Tzucubal in Guatemala’s western highlands.
Telemundo and CNN en Español reported that Pascual and Juan had hoped to work in the US and make enough money to lift their families out of poverty.
"He had so many dreams. He dreamed of a better future, building a home, supporting his siblings as well as his father," María Tutul, Juan's cousin, told CNN en Español.
Footage taken shortly after the cousin's deaths were confirmed shows an inconsolable family, sobbing with their faces against the wall.
Manuel Tulul, Juan's father, told Telemundo that before his son left for the US he told him he was going to fight for a better life there.
"He left because of poverty," Tulul told Telemundo.
Nearly half of the people in Guatemala live in poverty, according to the World Bank Group. That rate rises to nearly 80% for Indigenous people like Pascual and Juan, who make up more than 40% of the country's population.
Climate change has continued to fuel food insecurity in Guatemala, which has led to an increase in migration to the US. In Guatemala, 1 in every 2 children suffers from chronic malnutrition, according to UNICEF.
Poverty and the Guatemalan government's inability to provide social services to support those in need have pushed many to immigrate to the US and send money back home to their families. In 2021, Guatemala received $15 billion in remittances, according to the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, DC–based think tank.
Misael Olivares Monterde, 16, was among the youngest of those who died in the tractor-trailer. The Mexican teenager had traveled to the border with his cousins — Yovani Valencia Olivares, 16, and Jair Valencia Olivares, 20. All three were among the dead.
The cousins wanted to work, save up money, and return to Mexico in four years to open their own clothing and shoe store, the Associated Press reported. Their parents had taken out loans, using their homes as collateral, to pay for the $10,000 smuggling fee for each cousin.
The night before he left, Misael asked his mom to wake him up when it was time for him to leave for the US.
"For a moment, I thought about not doing it so he wouldn’t go,” Hermelinda Monterde Jiménez told the AP. “But it was his decision and his own dream.”
Police use tear gas as Sri Lankan protesters storm prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe 's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Wednesday, July 13, 2022. (photo: Rafiq Maqbool/AP)
Protesters in Sri Lanka Brave Tear Gas and Storm Prime Minister's Office
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his wife left aboard a Sri Lankan Air Force plane bound for the Maldives, the air force said in a statement. That brought little relief to the island nation gripped for months by an economic disaster that has triggered severe shortages of food and fuel — and now is beset by political chaos.
Thousands of protesters demanding that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe also step down rallied outside his office compound and some scaled the walls, as the crowd roared its support, waving Sri Lankan flags and tossing water bottles to those heading inside. As protesters feared, Rajapaksa appointed his prime minister as acting president in his absence, according to the speaker of the Parliament.
The prime minister, whose whereabouts were unclear, declared a nationwide state of emergency.
"We need both ... to go home," said Supun Eranga, a 28-year-old civil servant in the crowd outside Wickremesinghe's office. "Ranil couldn't deliver what he promised during his two months, so he should quit. All Ranil did was try to protect the Rajapaksas."
Police used tear gas to try to disperse the protesters but failed, and more and more marched down the lane and towards the prime minister's office. As helicopters flew overhead, some demonstrators held up their middle fingers.
Some protesters who appeared to be unconscious were taken to a hospital.
Amid the chaos, state television stopped broadcasting, but it was not clear why.
While Rajapaksa agreed under pressure to resign Wednesday, Wickremesinghe has said he would only leave once a new government was in place.
Protesters have already seized the president's home and office and the official residence of the prime minister following months of demonstrations that have all but dismantled the Rajapaksa family's political dynasty, which ruled Sri Lanka for most of the past two decades.
On Wednesday morning, Sri Lankans continued to stream into the presidential palace. A growing line of people waited to enter the residence, many of whom had traveled from outside the capital of Colombo on public transport.
Protesters have vowed to occupy the official buildings until the top leaders are gone. For days, people have flocked to the presidential palace almost as if it were a tourist attraction — swimming in the pool, marveling at the paintings and lounging on the beds piled high with pillows. At one point, they also burned the prime minister's private home.
At dawn, the protesters took a break from chanting as the Sri Lankan national anthem blared from speakers. A few waved the flag.
Malik D' Silva, a 25-year-old demonstrator occupying the president's office, said Rajapaksa "ruined this country and stole our money." He said he voted for Rajapaksa in 2019 believing his military background would keep the country safe after Islamic State-inspired bomb attacks earlier that year killed more than 260 people.
Nearby, 28-year-old Sithara Sedaraliyanage and her 49-year-old mother wore black banners around their foreheads that read "Gota Go Home," the rallying cry of the demonstrations.
"We expected him to be behind bars — not escape to a tropical island! What kind of justice is that?" Sedaraliyanage said. "This is the first time people in Sri Lanka have risen like this against a president. We want some accountability."
Protesters accuse the president and his relatives of siphoning money from government coffers for years and Rajapaksa's administration of hastening the country's collapse by mismanaging the economy.
The family has denied the corruption allegations, but Rajapaksa acknowledged some of his policies contributed to the meltdown, which has left the island nation laden with debt and unable to pay for imports of basic necessities.
The shortages have sown despair among Sri Lanka's 22 million people and were all the more shocking because before the recent crisis, the economy had been expanding and a comfortable middle class growing.
The political impasse has only added fuel to the economic disaster since the absence of an alternative unity government threatened to delay a hoped-for bailout from the International Monetary Fund. In the meantime, the country is relying on aid from neighboring India and from China.
As the protests escalated Wednesday outside the prime minister's compound, his office imposed a state of emergency that gives broader powers to the military and police and declared an immediate curfew in the western province that includes Colombo.
The air force said in a statement that it provided an aircraft, with the defense ministry approval, for the president and his wife to travel to the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean known for exclusive tourist resorts. It said all immigration and customs laws were followed.
The whereabouts of other family members who had served in the government, including several who resigned their posts in recent months, were uncertain.
Sri Lankan presidents are protected from arrest while in power, and it is likely Rajapaksa planned his escape while he still had constitutional immunity. A corruption lawsuit against him in his former role as a defense official was withdrawn when he was elected president in 2019.
Sri Lankan lawmakers agreed to elect a new president next week but have struggled to decide on the makeup of a new government to lift the bankrupt country out of economic and political collapse.
The new president will serve the remainder of Rajapaksa's term, which ends in 2024, and could potentially appoint a new prime minister, who would then have to be approved by Parliament.
"Gotabaya resigning is one problem solved — but there are so many more," said Bhasura Wickremesinghe, a 24-year-old student of maritime electrical engineering, who is not related to the prime minister.
He complained that Sri Lankan politics have been dominated for years by "old politicians" who all need to go. "Politics needs to be treated like a job — you need to have qualifications that get you hired, not because of what your last name is," he said, referring to the Rajapaksa family.
The coal waste impoundment at the Elk Run processing plant (photo: Lyntha Scott Eiler/LIbrary of Congress)
The activism spotlight has left the Coal River Valley. But when the battlefield is your home, you don’t give up the fight.
Walk leads the way past his parents’ house, a shaggy behemoth of a dog barking gruffly in the yard. (“He’s half wolf,” he explains. “My sister’s ex-boyfriend paid thousands of dollars for him.”) On through a grove of trees, branches still bare in early spring, thick with bramble bushes. The air is damp with light rain spitting from a sudden cloud, but grainy in a way that you can feel in the back of your throat. From the muddy riverbank you can see an enormous chute protruding from one of the mountainsides that frames the valley, black coal pouring out of it to be carted off by a constant parade of trucks. Clouds of taupe dust billow off the trucks as they pull in and out of the mine entrance, and swirl in eddies over the ragged asphalt.
Not much more than the length of a city block stretches between the coal chute and the Walks’ front door. Coal has been mined in the valley for the past two hundred-odd years — and the Walks and their kin have been here almost as long. But the Black Eagle mine is new, having opened in 2018, and a stream of anthracite, dust, and rock pours out of the mountain and more or less directly onto the front doorstep. Walk’s grandfather already has black lung from years spent working in another mine up the road; his mother Shelia wakes up and wipes a layer of silica dust that collects on the kitchen counters overnight, even with every window shut. Natasha’s baby was born premature.
Walk is 32 years old and has been fighting against coal companies in the valley his entire adult life. There was a time when he was traveling around to every state in the lower 48 (by his own count) to speak on behalf of Coal River Mountain Watch, the tiny grassroots organization where he works. He would go to summits and conferences and university halls and talk about mountaintop removal mining and contaminated creeks and poisonous air and sky-high rates of cancer, and the power of real, on-the-ground, flesh-and-blood activism to fight back against all that.
But today, if you suggest that Walk is a homegrown hero of the “youth climate movement,” he bristles. For two reasons: One, he’s been paying his own bills for half his life, which he’d argue places him squarely outside of the “youth” category. And two, he’s tired of being lauded as a savior in the war on coal, especially because he’s seen the way that war goes when the environmental movement’s attention turns elsewhere.
At the start of this millennium, the Coal River Valley that runs through southern West Virginia’s Boone and Raleigh counties was the site of a vibrant anti-coal movement. A few ambitious and adventurous environmental activists decided that if they wanted to put a sword in the heart of the looming climate crisis, there was no better place to start than deep inside the dragon’s lair.
The legend pretty much writes itself. Coal companies were tearing down biodiverse forests and blowing up mountains to excavate many millions of tons of climate-warming black gold, leaving impoverished and sickened communities and destroyed ecosystems in their wake. To fight back against them, hundreds of activists traveled from all over the world to West Virginia, forming blockades, camping out in trees, and chaining themselves to equipment.
And somewhere along the way, the movement lost its momentum. Over the course of a decade, the spotlight on West Virginia’s coal country faded, even as new surface mines continued to grow like a fungus. A new threat had appeared: fracking, and all the frenzied new fossil fuel development that came with it. The activists slowly packed up and trickled back home or joined protests against oil and gas pipelines. The coal industry remained, its grip weakened by lawsuits, bankruptcies, and the growth of cheap natural gas, but very much alive.
This is an American environmental story for the 21st century, with all the trappings — the fickle attentions of fame and the media, the seemingly never-ending battle between humans and corporations — all tied up in the tale of a man trying to protect his home. The battle against coal expansion and mountaintop mining continues, but without the media attention or the funding that came with it back when the well-known climate scientist James Hansen came to town. But it’s hard for someone like Walk to abandon his fight against the coal company, when the stakes are no less than the home he hopes to live in forever.
To learn how civil disobedience in the name of climate change made its way to Walk’s hometown, I found Mike Roselle, the 68-year-old veteran activist who co-founded the eco-activist collective Earth First! and orchestrated Greenpeace’s first American ventures into organized civil disobedience in the latter half of the 1980s. He organized his way across most of the Mountain West to land in the hollowed-out mining town of Rock Creek, West Virginia, down the road from the Family Dollar and the Exxon and over a clattering wooden bridge, on a plot of land with three cabins tucked between the Coal River and a grove of trees.
Roselle has been fixing up the property himself for about 15 years. He first started working on it when he rented it to house the young anarchists and activists who had migrated up to the valley to join the anti-mountaintop removal cause.
The middle cabin where he and his roommate Cat Dees, another transplant brought here by the movement, reside is humbly decorated, with a wood-burning stove and rows of mason jars lining the kitchen walls. He has grown old here; when I meet him he is tall and thin, with bone-white hair and ice-blue eyes, and he steps slowly and carefully around the cabins to describe the work he’s done: an entire rebuild of this wall of this one, full rewiring, installation of the warm, gold-hued kitchen.
Earth First!, when it got started in the 1980s, operated by the motto “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.” It garnered the attention of environmentalists and loggers alike for protests in which activists locked themselves to trees and logging equipment, occupying forest lands they sought to protect for months at a time. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, and all the urgency it portended for climate change, turned Roselle’s attention from forests to coal. He started Climate Ground Zero in Montana, where he struggled to organize direct actions against coal development; he couldn’t get a dozen people to show up to block a coal train. It was in 2005 that he met Julia Bonds, known as Judy, the Goldman Prize-winning founder of Coal River Mountain Watch.
The legend — if you believe Roselle himself, who loves to spin a yarn — is that Bonds caught him and his friends sneaking off into the woods to smoke a joint at a conference for forest conservation activists, they invited her to join them, and the rest is history. That was how Roselle first learned about how all across southern West Virginia, coal companies were using explosives to blow the tops off mountains to lay bare the coal underneath, turning lush forest to surface mines. Over a million acres of forest had been lost, countless biodiverse ecosystems destroyed, any number of streams polluted with the resulting waste and rubble bulldozed into valleys, and, of course, the coal played a key role in pushing carbon emissions to the limits of livable levels. Bonds insisted that it had to be seen to be believed, and invited Roselle to the Coal River Valley that very spring.
“They organized a trip to pick ramps, which I learned was kind of a traditional spring outing for many families, and everybody gets together and has a good time,” he recalled. “So we went up to Cherry Pond Mountain, which was everybody’s favorite gathering spot, and picked ramps. And then Judy says, ‘Well, I hope you like this place because next time you come here, it won’t be here. Massey Energy is committed to blow it up.’”
Bonds wanted him to take the Redwood Summer model pioneered in California by Earth First! leader Judy Barri, and replicate it to block mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia. In June 1990, Barri had organized a training camp for young activists, largely college students, to teach them how to use their bodies to protect the redwood forest in Humboldt County, California. They took part in tree sits, where they’d camp out in the canopy, or chain themselves to the enormous trunks. They would lie spread-eagled on the ground in front of logging equipment and gather en masse to blockade the dock in Eureka, California, where timber would be loaded for export.
Roselle started spending more and more time in Appalachia, collaborating on actions and blockades with the Tennessee-based anti-mountaintop removal organization Mountain Justice. He eventually made Rock Creek the home of Climate Ground Zero in 2008, in large part to support the efforts of Coal River Mountain Watch. That year, Bonds and the rest of the Coal River Mountain Watch cohort learned that Massey Energy had acquired a permit to construct a road up to Coal River Mountain to start mining. The moment had come. Roselle pulled up a few YouTube videos of footage from Redwood Summer, and everyone agreed: We want to do this. They organized a blockade of the road, and then another, and then another.
That was the year Junior Walk turned 18 years old, and his life began to change.
When Walk graduated from high school in 2008, he had been accepted to the Art Institute up in Pittsburgh. He quickly realized that neither he nor his family had any chance of pulling together the tuition money, so he abandoned all college plans and got a job at the Elk Run Coal Processing Plant in Sylvester, another town in the valley, alongside his dad.
Elk Run is notable for two reasons: It was the first non-union mine established by the coal baron A.T. Massey, a cannon fired in the United Mine Workers of America conflict in the 1980s. Supporters of the union set fire to the plant more than once.
It’s also the site of one of three massive coal waste impoundments in the Big Coal River watershed. The liquid slurry left over from treated coal, after it’s processed into its lightest form for shipment, gets poured into a hollow that’s dammed up by the solid waste. These black lakes of toxic sludge, hundreds of feet deep and contained by not much more than a wall of mud and rock, are a looming threat to the communities that lie beneath them, nestled at the foot of the mountain.
Walk performed odd maintenance jobs at Elk Run. One of them entailed wading thigh-deep through the coal waste slurry as it got pumped out into the impoundment. He couldn’t avoid the thought that he might die either from drowning in slurry or chemical exposure-induced cancer, so he quit only to find that there weren’t a whole lot of options: Dairy Queen, Dollar General, and that was about it. Within the year, he’d taken another job working security on a strip mine, where he’d sit for hours every day and watch bulldozers and excavators rip chunks out of the mountain, hungry for the coal beneath.
“Within the first week of me working up there, I just started feeling miserable about it, watching that machinery tear down that mountain,” Walk says, recalling the dust and noise that plagued his own childhood.
Walk had known Judy Bonds his whole life; he went to school with her grandson, and she worked at the gas station with his grandma. After a few weeks on his security job, he went down to the Coal River Mountain Watch office and had a heart-to-heart with Bonds about what he was seeing. Soon after, he started volunteering for Coal River Mountain Watch, writing their newsletter on a clunky desktop computer he’d built himself.
“I would load that into the passenger seat of my car and drive it to work with me, and I’d run an extension cord out to the box on the power pole,” he recalls, gleefully. “And I’d sit there getting paid as a security guard while popping out articles for the Mountain Watch newsletter.”
By the start of 2010, Bonds had given Walk a staff job at Coal River Mountain Watch, where he took on a wide variety of roles to suit a tiny organization with intermittent funding and a fairly daunting mission. That meant scouting sites for blockades and protests, recruiting and training activists, and planning and participating in the actions. He traveled around the country — frequently with Larry Gibson, a prominent local anti-mountaintop removal activist — giving talks at college campuses and environmental conferences: “I would try to convince everybody that I could that it was a good idea to chain themselves to some big yellow piece of equipment.”
At the time, a growing slate of celebrities was making the trek down to the valley. Grammy-award-winning country singer Kathy Mattea, a native of Charleston, the state capital, met with Judy Bonds and marched up Blair Mountain to protest its likely destruction. The actress Daryl Hannah published a rambling op-ed about her experience getting arrested with James Hansen while protesting mountaintop removal around the Coal River. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. narrated a documentary on the subject.
Walk, meanwhile, played a part in recruiting the valley’s cadre of foot soldiers. Members of other groups, like Mountain Justice and Climate Ground Zero, lent a hand in organizing and manpower. The population of the entire Coal River Valley numbers in the low thousands, and at the peak of the movement around 2009 there were a couple hundred activists from out of town who had come to join the cause.
Some culture clash was inevitable. Shelia Walk, Junior’s mother, says that the fact that the Coal River Valley is so secluded makes an influx of anything new and different all the more noticeable: “Anyone that’s coming around with pink hair, everybody’s like — gasp!” Early on in Climate Ground Zero’s tenure in Rock Creek, one organizer’s dog killed a local’s prize fighting chicken.
There were moments of more peaceful integration. In the late 1990s, Gibson had gotten a few dozen acres on top of Kayford Mountain put into a land trust, and he’d built cabins and set up a gathering area where activists could get together to socialize, plan actions, or just enjoy nature. Shelia Walk and a few other women in the community regularly came up to the mountain to cook for them, including for a Fourth of July event well-attended by both locals and activists. John Paul Webber, the 6-foot-5-inch Gadsden-flag-tattooed proprietor of the gun-and-pawn shop in Whitesville, got shit-faced one night and rode his four-wheeler up Kayford. Walk initially thought that Webber had shown up just to wreak havoc, but they hit it off and today are “first-tier” friends.
Webber’s was one of the friendlier drunken ambushes of Kayford. Many residents of the Coal River Valley have bought their homes and fed their children thanks to the only real industry within 100 miles, and if you ask them about the anti-mountaintop removal movement you might hear a very different perspective: God put coal in the mountain so we could take it out. The way many locals saw it, the anti-mountaintop-removal movement posed a threat to their livelihoods — a belief eagerly fueled by the coal companies. Early in his activist career, Walk was never seen with his father because of the risk that would pose to his job at the coal processing plant.
The activists’ victories mounted. They demonstrated at then-Governor Joe Manchin’s office and mansion in Charleston as well as in Washington, D.C., securing more and more national attention. They successfully blocked or delayed numerous permits to fill streams with mountaintop removal waste. Activists thwarted blasting on the Bee Tree mine site with the then-longest tree-sit in West Virginia history. In 2010, Coal River Mountain Watch scored a huge coup in a years-long battle to get Marsh Fork Elementary moved outside of the danger zone of the coal silo and the slurry impoundment, and rallied together the money to construct a new school several miles up the road, including a long-disputed donation from Massey Energy. Walk calls this the greatest victory of his activist career.
The coal companies started to pay more attention, and their employees and the families of their employees did too. Sneers in the grocery store grew to hollered threats out of truck windows and worse. Walk has had a gun pulled on him more times than he can count.
Many locals still see the activists as an invasion of outsiders, even though the movement’s leaders were almost entirely born and bred in the valley, describing them as paid by outside organizations to come in to cause trouble. Cliff Lester, a retired coal miner at the Catenary mine who now runs a pay lake stocked with trout and catfish at the south end of the valley, recalled that the activists “made life a living hell” for those who worked in the coal industry at the time.
“I don’t know if they didn’t understand or if they just didn’t really care,” he says. “They just look at it as destroying mountains, but in reality, we took the coal out that was needed for electricity, for building buildings. And over the years, I’ve seen the coal industry go down extremely. We couldn’t get permits. A lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, their vehicles, everything.”
Those lost jobs, however, have less to do with the effectiveness of the activists and more to do with the economic realities. The mechanization of coal removal and processing had eliminated the need for thousands of human jobs, and looming competition from cheap natural gas in fueling power plants made coal a less desirable commodity.
But the strength of the anti-mountaintop removal movement in the Coal River Valley was the fact that it was spearheaded by people who had deep roots in the community, who love their home so much that they will be shunned by their own neighbors to defend it. “You get a handful of very committed people, people who something inside of them just snaps one day and they decide, you know, screw it, I’m going to devote my life to being a nemesis to the coal industry,” Walk says. “I mean, that’s what happened to me.”
It also happened to Judy Bonds, whose coal miner father died of black lung, and who then co-founded Coal River Mountain Watch to fight back against the coal dust pollution in the creeks her grandson played in and the coal waste impoundments that threatened to drown the only community she’d ever known. It happened to Debbie Jarrell, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch today, whose family name is sprinkled all up and down Route 3: Charles B. Jarrell General Store, Jarrell Backwoods Towing, Perry Jarrell Road, Jarrell’s Ridge. Jarrell first joined the cause around 2005 because her granddaughter was a student at Marsh Fork Elementary, and she kept getting sick. It happened to Larry Gibson, who was so sickened by how mountaintop removal mining had transformed the home that he and his ancestors had grown up in that he walked the length of West Virginia north-to-south to warn fellow mountaineers about the threat.
In January 2011, when Junior Walk had been working as a full-time organizer for just about a year, Judy Bonds died of cancer, her disease believed to be brought about by airborne dust from mountaintop removal in the region. By the end of 2012, Larry Gibson would be felled by a heart attack.
It was around that time that a hydraulic fracturing boom in the Marcellus Shale birthed a crop of new gas wells all across northern West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Natural gas-powered electricity was a cheaper and ostensibly cleaner alternative to coal-fired, but the magnitude of the threat it posed to the climate and the environment became clear: explosions and flares on wells and pipelines, methane leaks, the mysterious cocktail of fracking chemicals that seeped into water tables and tributaries.
In 2014, oil production in the United States jumped by 16 percent to 8.7 million barrels per day, the largest single-year increase in a century, largely due to the fracking boom in the Bakken shale region of North Dakota and Montana. The dangers of oil infrastructure seized public attention in 2010, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and continued to make headlines throughout the decade: the Enbridge pipeline leak into the Kalamazoo River, the largest inland oil spill in history; the deadly derailment of an oil train in Lac-Mégantic, Québec; the Refugio oil spill on California’s Gaviota coast. Meanwhile, coal production in West Virginia had been in steep decline pretty much since 2009.
Back in Raleigh County, things had started to fall apart within the activist community. The deaths of Bonds and Gibson had been a huge blow. Mike Roselle and the younger activists were increasingly at odds over the organization’s hierarchical structure and the ostensible need for increasingly radical tactics, which eventually lead to the youth contingent storming the house in Rock Creek and announcing that they were forming their own movement: RAMPS, Radical Action for Mountains’ and Peoples’ Survival. (Walk is a co-founder of this organization, but no longer involved.) Plans to lobby for a wind farm on top of Coal River Mountain, already a bit of a pipe dream, faded to an increasingly small likelihood.
If you ask Vernon Haltom, the executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch, when the anti-mountaintop removal movement in the Coal River Valley started to lose steam, he’d pin it to 2015. “Some of the big coal companies declared bankruptcy that year,” he explained over the phone. “And then a lot of the press, even some of our allied groups, declared victory, that mountaintop removal was essentially over. And they don’t really get involved with us anymore because we kept saying, ‘No, it’s not, it’s still ongoing.’”
Walk watched as most of his friends trickled off to new battles, primarily against projects such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline. “I can’t really be mad about it,” he says, “because they did what they could, and some of them gave years out of their lives and so much effort to invest in this fight here to help my community, you know what I mean? And so I can’t really feel any other way except grateful for the time that they did spend here.”
But he isn’t interested in joining the pipeline fight. “As long as they want to work against the coal industry and make that their main effort, I’ll be right there working shoulder to shoulder with them,” he says. “But if they’re doing all this other stuff against natural gas and all that, yeah, that’s great. But that’s not where I’m going to put my effort because this is my fight, this is my community and it’s what I do.”
I first met Walk at the Coal River Mountain Watch office, which occupies a simple brick building that used to house a diner on the main street of Naoma, roughly halfway between his parents’ home and Mike Roselle’s. It’s filled with relics of the organization’s 24 years: Bonds’ Goldman Prize, framed newspaper cutouts, photos of protests on the steps of the state capitol in Charleston. Walk is the organization’s only current employee outside of its directors. The office is unheated on this cool April morning. I ask Walk to tell me about what he does these days.
His mission: to catch coal companies in the act of breaking environmental laws, no easy feat. He has spent years intimately learning the land that he’s committed to protect. He’s memorized a whole network of old logging roads, forged back trails on foot up thistle-thick slopes. He’ll go out there with a camera and a drone and take pictures of damaged hillsides or a digging site’s spread onto unpermitted land, and take his findings back to try to goad the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection into doing something about it, also no easy task. Haltom will make use of a small plane from Southwings, another conservation organization, to fly over mountaintop removal projects and document new developments.
On May 15, for example, Haltom and Walk got word that the Little Marsh Fork, which runs into the Coal River, was running pitch-black. Heavy rains had overflowed a stockpile at the processing plant. Haltom had to call the DEP inspector out of church, and Walk ran out to capture the inky water via drone.
“The whole point of it is to make them spend as much money as we possibly can to make it less economically feasible for them to keep mining that coal,” Walk says. “Paying fines, going back on to the site to fix stuff like slips in the hillside or whatever. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts.”
It may surprise those involved in the climate movement today to learn that mountaintop removal mining is not only legal but active. Walk describes new blasts into the mountain as a near-daily occurrence. Later that day he drives me up to a surface mine in a rattling Subaru — a professor he met through his activism traded it to him for a hunting rifle — with the patient resignation of someone who has given the same tour a thousand times.
The Subaru climbs up a dirt road through budding forest, all umber and olive with splashes of violet and sun-yellow. Then suddenly, under a brilliant sky streaked with fast-moving clouds, everything is gray. A surface mine is just coal and rock as far as the eye can see, small heaps of it graduating into foothills. You can see the soft round heads of the surrounding mountains several miles off. We can’t stop the car and get out to walk around because Walk’s vehicle is well-known to any employees of the coal company that might be on site.
He smokes a cigarette on the drive home, and we go to talk to his mother, Shelia.
The nightmare of the Black Eagle mine, next to the Walk family home in Eunice, both mother and son agree, started with the noise. In 2020, Alpha Natural Resources put in an exhaust fan so loud that you couldn’t talk to someone standing two feet away without yelling.
“I’d call the DEP and I’d be like, hold on, let me open the back door and you’ll hear what my problem is,” Shelia recalls. “And they would say, ‘Oh man.’ Yeah, imagine me sitting here!”
It took months of filing reports to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, but eventually Alpha Natural Resources moved the exhaust fan. That still left the dust — not just coal dust, which Shelia’s lived with all her life on Route 3, but silica dust. One morning this past February, Shelia went to make coffee and found every surface of the kitchen coated in a light white powder. She initially assumed her husband had somehow exploded a bottle of baby powder while taking care of their grandson, but gradually realized what she was looking at. “And if it’s sitting in our kitchen like this, we have breathed it. Oh, my Lord. And it’s scary because that’s what causes cancer.”
Alpha Natural Resources had bought out the couple dozen residents of the village of Pettus, immediately next to Eunice, to knock down their homes and make more space for the Black Eagle mine. Shelia had expected the residents of Eunice would be offered a buyout, too, but it never happened. When she first learned that the mine would be put in, she had no intention of ever leaving her lifelong home. But she’s had enough; living next to an operating coal mine makes her miserable. In June, she and her husband bought a new home with a big garden on a hillside in Horse Creek, about 10 miles away.
Shelia’s neighbors are fed up too, and have joined her in community meetings to demand action from the Department of Environmental Protection against Alpha Natural Resources, which might include a buyout, although that’s an uphill battle. Walk and Vernon Haltom have helped her and other people in Eunice by getting their documentations of dust and noise and other offenses filed with the DEP. I ask Shelia if she thought the anti-coal activist movement of the prior decade had influenced the town’s apparent disillusionment with the coal industry at all.
“A lot of the older people had already realized what the coal company has done,” she says. “And I think that’s where my eyes were starting to open, when I was a young mother, from my grandparents and my dad and just listening to their stories. And once the so-called tree huggers come in, I think it started to open eyes for more people my age. After you hear it a couple times, you’re like, you know, that makes sense.
“And when the company decides they don’t need you no more, you ain’t gonna have nowhere to go hunting, nowhere to go fishing, nowhere to go swimming. And they just leave an empty, flattened place that nothing can grow or live on.”
A couple of weeks before my trip to the Coal River Valley, an unaffiliated group of organizers announced something called the Coal Baron Blockade. It was a planned protest at the Grant Town Power Plant in Marion County, which burns gob — coal waste — bought from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s family’s company, to the tune of a few hundred thousand in profit for Manchin himself every year. Prior to the event, I found it impossible to ascertain the protest’s lead organizer or its specific goals.
I asked Walk if he knew anything about the Coal Baron Blockade. He said it was clear it was organized by out-of-staters, and they had reached out to him and a bunch of other West Virginia activists and asked him to be part of it. He didn’t see reason enough to make the time.
“If the weather’s nice, I need to be out with the drone and catching the coal companies doing illegal things, so that doesn’t leave a lot of time to drive plumb to Morgantown for a weekend when I’m not even on the clock.” He gestured to his Subaru. “You see what I’m driving? I’m not putting more miles on that thing.”
If you ask Walk why he still does this, his answer is simple: He feels he owes it to his predecessors — Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson, Chuck Nelson — because they gave him a purpose, told him they were proud of him, gassed him up.
“Not that I’m self-important enough to feel like I shoulder their legacy or anything like that, because that would be impossible for anybody,” Walk is quick to add. “But somebody’s got to be the voice out here saying, ‘No, that’s wrong, what the coal industry does is bad.’ And that’s just kind of my lot in life.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.