03 July 22
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Trump’s demands to lead a march to Capitol Hill sheds new light on his mindset as the siege began.
Trump brought it up repeatedly with key advisers in the Oval Office, according to a person who talked with him about it. The president told others he wanted a dramatic, made-for-TV moment that could pressure Republican lawmakers to support his demand to throw out the electoral college results showing that Joe Biden had defeated him, the person said.
The excursion that almost happened came into clearer focus this week, as the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 presented explosive testimony and records detailing Trump’s fervent demands to lead his supporters mobbing the seat of government. Though Trump’s trip was ultimately thwarted by his own security officers, the new evidence cuts closer to the critical question of what he knew about the violence in store for that day.
Trump has acknowledged his foiled effort to reach the Capitol. “Secret Service wouldn’t let me,” he told The Washington Post in April. “I wanted to go. I wanted to go so badly. Secret Service says you can’t go. I would have gone there in a minute.”
But as Trump repeatedly floated the idea in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, several of his advisers doubted he meant it or didn’t take the suggestion seriously. One senior administration official said Trump raised the prospect repeatedly but in a “joking manner.”
As a result, the White House staff never turned Trump’s stated desires into concrete plans. Press officers made no preparations for a detour to the Capitol, such as scheduling an additional stop for the motorcade and the pool of reporters who follow the president’s movements. There was no operational advance plan drafted for the visit. No speech was written for him to deliver on the Hill, and it wasn’t clear exactly what Trump would do when he got there, said the person who talked with Trump about the idea.
This account of Trump’s ceaseless plotting to join the mob at the Capitol on Jan. 6 is based on committee testimony and evidence as well as 15 former officials, aides, law enforcement officials and others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal details.
Aides did not know where Trump got the idea, this person said, but it wasn’t from inside the White House. The chief of staff, Mark Meadows, discussed plans to bring Trump to the Capitol with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the campaign’s efforts to overturn the election results, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a close aide to Meadows.
“I remember hearing a few different ideas discussed between Mark and Scott Perry, Mark and Rudy Giuliani,” Hutchinson said in videotaped testimony to the Jan. 6 committee played during Tuesday’s hearing. “I know that there were discussions about him having another speech outside of the Capitol before going in. I know that there is a conversation about him going into the House chamber at one point.”
Meadows declined to comment through his attorney. Giuliani and a spokeswoman for Perry did not respond to requests for comment.
Hutchinson’s attorneys said Wednesday that she “stands by all of the testimony she provided yesterday, under oath.”
Hutchinson’s account was supported by other testimony played at the hearing. “He brought it up, he said, ‘I want to go down to the Capitol,’ ” Max Miller, a White House aide now running for Congress in Ohio, said in taped testimony. But Miller’s entire testimony wasn’t played, where he suggested it was a short-lived idea, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some White House officials were out of the loop. Ordinarily, the White House’s legislative affairs staffers would be involved in a visit to Capitol Hill, but they were not briefed on any plans for him to go on Jan. 6, according to two senior administration officials. Aides to Vice President Mike Pence heard secondhand from other White House advisers that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol, but they were never given a formal plan and did not expect him to follow through, according to a Pence adviser with direct knowledge of their plans.
“There was no plan for what to do if Trump showed up,” the Pence adviser said. “Frankly, we didn’t think it was going to happen.”
Some of his allies said Trump never brought up the idea of going to the Capitol with them, even as he bandied it about internally with his aides and Secret Service team. “Not to my knowledge was he ever coming up here,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who regularly talked with Trump in the days leading up to Jan. 6. “To me, I don’t see him going to a riot.”
On Jan. 4, Trump raised the issue with several White House aides again, but Secret Service and senior staff warned him it would be logistically impossible and dangerous, a person familiar with the discussion said. Another adviser said the Secret Service was particularly skittish about a trip to the Capitol because a trip in November — when Trump went into a crowd of election fraud protesters in Washington — was viewed as nightmarish and difficult to manage.
The next day, on the eve of the rally, Tony Ornato, the White House deputy chief of staff for operations, told a senior staffer there was no possibility they were going to the Capitol, saying, “That is not part of the plan,” the staffer recalled.
Trump, though, seemed to have other ideas. Just before he addressed the rally on the Ellipse, Trump gathered with family members and close aides in a tent backstage. As Trump looked at monitors showing a video feed of the crowd, Hutchinson testified that she overheard him complaining about unoccupied space in the shot and wanting more people to enter. According to her testimony, Ornato explained to Trump that some people in the crowd couldn’t go through the security screening because they had weapons.
“I overheard the president say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me,'” Hutchinson testified. She also recalled hearing Trump say, “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol after the rally’s over.”
The moment was captured in photographs that the committee obtained from the National Archives and displayed during the hearing. The scene in the tent also appeared in a video recorded by Donald Trump Jr., showing the president looking at the screens and talking to Meadows and his daughter Ivanka while Kimberly Guilfoyle danced to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”
Other people in the tent at the time did not respond to requests for comment or declined to corroborate or dispute Hutchinson’s account on the record. Some Secret Service officials told the committee they did not recall Trump saying he wanted to admit more people despite being warned of weapons in the crowd, according to a person briefed on their testimony.
Trump denied wanting to let in people with guns. “Who would ever want that? Not me!” he posted on his Truth Social platform.
When Trump took the stage, he told the rally, “We’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you.” The remark stunned staffers who didn’t understand that to be the plan.
“I told people we were not really going to the Capitol,” recalled the senior staffer who has spoken with Ornato. “It never crossed my mind that was legitimate.”
But as Trump left the stage, he made clear he was serious. That’s when his personal assistant, Nick Luna, first became aware of Trump’s desire to go to the Capitol, according to his taped testimony played at Tuesday’s hearing.
Hutchinson testified that she overheard Meadows tell the president he was still working on arranging the trip up Capitol Hill. According to Hutchinson, she told Meadows that Ornato said the movement wasn’t possible, and Meadows responded, “Okay,” before getting into the motorcade.
“MOGUL’s going to the Capital [sic] … they are clearing a route now,” a National Security Council staffer posted to an internal chat obtained by the committee, using Trump’s Secret Service code name.
“They are begging him to reconsider,” another message said. When a planned route was posted to the chat, the log shows a staffer responding, “So this is happening.”
Inside the presidential SUV, Trump’s demands to go to the Capitol culminated in a dramatic showdown, according to Hutchinson, who said Ornato described the incident to her shortly afterward. By her account, Trump was under the impression from Meadows that his surprise trip to the Capitol was about to happen. In the car, Secret Service agent Bobby Engel told Trump the route to the Capitol could not be secured and they would return to the West Wing, Hutchinson said.
“The president had a very strong, very angry response to that,” she testified. “Tony described him as being irate. The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now.’”
When Engel insisted that the car was instead bound for the White House, Hutchinson said Trump reached toward the steering wheel. Engel grabbed his arm, Hutchinson testified, and said, “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.”
According to Hutchinson’s testimony about Ornato’s account to her, Trump used his other hand to lunge toward Engel. When Ornato told this story to Hutchinson, with Engel in the room, she said, he gestured toward his collarbones. When Hutchinson recounted this at the hearing, she placed a hand at the base of her neck.
Trump denied trying to grab the steering wheel, calling Hutchinson’s testimony “'sick' and fraudulent.” Ornato and Engel were not asked about the incident when they testified to the committee, the person briefed on the Secret Service testimony said.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich dismissed Hutchinson’s testimony in a statement Thursday: “The fact that The Washington Post is still trying to peddle testimony from a witness who has been widely discredited, and who many believe perjured herself — which is a felony — is an absolute embarrassment.”
Three agents who accompanied Trump on Jan. 6 are disputing that Trump assaulted or grabbed at Engel and/or the steering wheel, according to one current and one former law enforcement official familiar with their accounts. The three agents, Engle and Ornato are also willing to testify under oath to the committee about their recollection of events on Jan. 6 in the Secret Service vehicle, the two people said. The three agents do not dispute that Trump was furious that the agents would not take him to the Capitol.
Even after the car returned Trump to the West Wing, he still wouldn’t let go of wanting to reach the Capitol.
“When we got back to the White House, he said he wanted to physically walk with the marchers, and according to my notes, he then said he’d be fine with just riding the Beast,” former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in videotaped testimony to the committee, referring to the nickname for the fortified presidential limo. “He wanted to be a part of the march in some fashion.”
Trump was furious with Meadows for failing to make the trip happen, Hutchinson testified that Meadows told her. By the time they were back in the West Wing, the televisions were showing live coverage of the rioters overpowering police and getting closer to the Capitol’s doors and windows. Hutchinson testified that she entered Meadows’s office and asked him if he was watching.
“The rioters are getting really close,” she recalled asking the chief of staff. “Have you talked to the president?”
“No,” Meadows answered, while scrolling and texting on his phone, according to Hutchinson’s testimony, “he wants to be alone right now.”
Abortion-rights protesters hold placards during a rally at the Columbia County courthouse. (photo: Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, told the Indianapolis Star that just three days after the federal right to an abortion was reversed she received a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio, who needed her help. The physician had a pregnant patient, a 10-year-old, who could no longer legally undergo the procedure in her home state.
In Indiana, for now at least, abortion is legal up to 22 weeks after a pregnant person's last menstrual cycle. However, Indiana politicians have scheduled a special legislative session later this month to address abortion laws. Republican lawmakers, who hold a supermajority in the state, indicate they intend to further restrict the procedure.
Despite the influx of patients seeking care across state lines, with abortion access likely to be restricted in Indiana, Bernard's ability to help those seeking the procedure in the future is uncertain.
"It's hard to imagine that in just a few short weeks we will have no ability to provide that care," Bernard, who agreed to help the 10-year-old patient, told the Indianapolis Star.
Bernard did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Other nearby states, including Illinois, where abortion is likely to remain legal, are bracing for an influx of patients seeking care from nearby states where the procedure is more heavily restricted, including Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Planned Parenthood Illinois expects the state will see an additional 20,000 to 30,000 patients overall crossing its border to receive abortions each year.
Chinese and U.S. flags flutter outside a company building in Shanghai. (photo: Reuters)
The Supreme Court voted to constrain the authority of the U.S.'s Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal- and gas-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act, sparking dismay among environmentalists.
Zhao told reporters at a regular briefing that the ruling had been criticised by the international community, adding that "it is not enough to just shout slogans to tackle climate change".
"We urge developed countries, including the United States, to... face up to their historical responsibilities and show greater ambition and action," he added.
Environmentalists in China said the decision could further undermine the broader climate relationship between Beijing and Washington, which has played a crucial role in securing global agreements to curb climate warming greenhouse gas.
"The ruling carries profound implications and will significantly weaken the conditions for future U.S.-China climate talks," said Li Shuo, senior adviser with Greenpeace.
"Backsliding" by the United States could also make it more unlikely that China will take more action to curb its coal consumption, which reached a record high in 2021, Li added.
“The Chinese side believes there won't be any quid pro quo on climate between them and the United States," he said.
President Xi Jinping pledged last year that China would start cutting coal consumption in 2026, with state think tanks expecting coal-fired power generation capacity to rise by another 150 gigawatts over the 2021-2025 period.
Amid concerns about economic growth and energy security, senior officials have continued to stress the need to manage the low-carbon energy transition with care.
Vice-Premier Han Zheng this week described coal as a "ballast" for the economy, adding that China "needs to maintain the bottom line of energy security based on the basic national conditions of coal predominance."
More than 4,200 laborers from around the world come to work in California with an H-2A visa. Most of them are employed in the agricultural industry. While these workers are protected by the same labor laws as anybody else, labor advocates say they are especially vulnerable to retaliation if they speak up against what they consider to be unfair or unsafe labor practices. (photo: Beth LaBerge/KQED)
That’s what Samuel left in the room he shared with other field workers at Mauritson Farms in Healdsburg, in the heart of Sonoma County’s wine country, last October.
He was heading back to his family in his hometown in Oaxaca, Mexico. The harvest had ended and his H-2A visa would soon expire.
He started working at Mauritson Farms in 2019 with an H-2A visa, which lets agricultural workers stay in the U.S. for limited periods of time. The program was modeled off the Bracero Program, which was created in 1942, thanks to an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments that brought Mexican workers to American farms. Labor rights groups point out that many of those braceros experienced wage theft, physical abuse and terrible working and living conditions.
Through the H-2A program, Samuel and a group of other young men from towns and rural communities in and around the Sola de Vega district in Oaxaca have come to California for years — from February through October — to work at Mauritson Farms, which owns and controls the vineyards that produce Mauritson Wines.
He left his belongings in Healdsburg with plans to come back in 2022. But he was never rehired by Mauritson Farms.
At the end of the 2021 growing season, Samuel and five other workers from Oaxaca spoke up against what they believed to be unfair and unsafe working conditions they had experienced for the past three years. They said they were asked to work on extremely hot days without adequate protections against the heat, that hours of their pay were docked for unjustified reasons and that they suffered verbal abuse from the foreman who supervised them.
With the support of the labor rights group North Bay Jobs With Justice, the group of six workers met with Cameron Mauritson, manager of the vineyard, in October to explain what they were experiencing.
“He apologized to us and said he was really sorry that this had happened at his company,” said Kevin, who also was at the meeting and worked alongside Samuel for the same period of time. “He promised that he would hire us again.”
For Samuel and Kevin — whose real names KQED is not using due to their fears of employment loss — this promise represented a lot more than a job offer for the next year. It signaled that the group could feel comfortable speaking out against unsafe working conditions and that Mauritson wouldn’t do what they feared the most: retaliate against them by not hiring them again.
“We left our things [at Mauritson Farms] believing we would come back,” Samuel said. “But none of it was true.”
Out of the six workers who met with Mauritson in October, none was called back to work in 2022, despite their completion of an application with Cierto Global, the company’s third-party recruiter service. Both Samuel and Kevin believe they were not rehired because they told management about unsafe working conditions they were experiencing in Mauritson's vineyards, a right protected by California labor standards.
North Bay Jobs With Justice representatives said they have reached out to Mauritson several times since February without receiving a response. Mauritson also declined KQED’s request for an interview.
On February 7, North Bay Jobs With Justice filed an unfair labor practice charge on behalf of the six workers with the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB), the state agency that investigates possible workplace abuses in the agricultural industry. The charge states that Mauritson Farms discriminated against the workers by “refusing to rehire them because they engaged in protected concerted activity.”
As the ALRB investigation moves forward, Samuel and Kevin spend their days taking on whatever work they can get in Oaxaca and looking for different farming jobs in the U.S., but with little luck. The window to receive an H-2A visa this year has closed, so they must look for jobs that don’t offer visas. With their remaining savings depleted and families to feed, time is running out to make enough money to survive.
California, home to the country’s largest agriculture sector, also has the nation’s third-most H-2A workers. As of this year, more than 4,200 laborers from around the world work in the state supporting the agriculture industry. And even though California has an extensive system of agencies and regulations meant to protect these workers, H-2A immigrants are still extremely vulnerable to illegal retaliation by their employers.
To bring foreign workers to the U.S., many H-2A employers use a network of both formal and informal recruiters that operate both inside and outside the country. Workers like Samuel and Kevin depend on these recruiters to find jobs in the U.S. and navigate the visa application process.
But when a worker speaks up about illegal labor practices, advocates say these recruiters often make sure the worker is blacklisted across the industry — making it harder for these laborers to find another job in the U.S. and for agricultural industry and labor agencies, who only have jurisdiction in the U.S., to enforce anti-retaliation rules.
'Employers do retaliate' even though it's illegal
Cynthia Rice has worked as a labor rights attorney for over 20 years. She’s now the director of litigation, advocacy and training at California Rural Legal Assistance, a nonprofit law firm that provides free legal aid across the state. She’s represented dozens of agricultural workers in cases involving dangerous working conditions, wage theft and retaliation.
At the start of each conversation with a new client, she makes one point clear.
“Retaliation is illegal,” she said, while adding that, “we never say the employer can't retaliate against you because of course the employer can retaliate against you. It’s just illegal and employers do retaliate.”
Thanks to decades of farmworker- and immigrant-led organizing, California has several agencies that enforce labor laws, including anti-retaliation rules. The ALRB was created after then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, which guaranteed collective bargaining rights for farmworkers. Additionally, the California Labor Commissioner’s Office investigates underpaid or missing wages, and the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Cal/OSHA) enforces workplace safety rules like heat protections for outdoor workers.
At the federal level, the Department of Labor processes job orders for the H-2A program and enforces employment contracts and the federal laws meant to protect guest workers. The department’s Wage and Hour Division investigates cases where employers may not be paying their workers properly or failing to provide housing, transportation or meals, which is required by the federal government.
Many immigrant farmworkers Rice has worked with come to her after they’ve been terminated or when they’re about to go back to their home countries after the harvest season. “Then they talk about the hours that were shaved or the meals and restrooms that they didn't get,” she explained.
But waiting until the end of harvest season to file a claim with the ALRB or other labor agencies is usually too late, she said, particularly for H-2A workers who typically have to leave the U.S. soon after. It gives attorneys like Rice very limited time to collect evidence and testimony before the worker heads back to their home country, which usually complicates communication as many H-2A holders come from rural communities in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, with limited access to the internet and telephone reception.
So why wait until the very last moment to speak up?
Retaliation can mean losing your job (and with that, your H-2A visa) after speaking up, but it can also include intimidation or punishment. Samuel remembers when his crew was working the fields in temperatures exceeding 95 degrees. “There were times where we felt so dehydrated that we were going to pass out,” he said. “We felt we wanted to vomit.”
When he’d tell the foreman how he and others were feeling, Samuel said the foreman would laugh at them and tell them to keep working. Kevin said that there were many hot days where the workers didn’t have any of the heat protections required by California law. “When it was 90, 95 degrees, we didn’t have any shady spots to have a glass of water or rest for a bit,” he said.
When outside temperatures exceed 80 degrees, Cal/OSHA requires employers to provide their workers with sufficient water, shade and rest. That means each employee should be able to drink at least one quart of water per hour and request breaks in the shade whenever they feel the need to. But a 2021 NPR investigation found that even with these protections in place, nearly four dozen California workers died from heatstroke and other heat-related illnesses within a 10-year period.
Cal/OSHA has stated that heat-related deaths can be prevented, but the agency has struggled with understaffing for years, making it harder for it to enforce its rules across California’s thousands of farms. So in many cases, the responsibility of protecting workers from heat falls solely on the employer.
A network of retaliation in the US — and abroad
A 2020 report by the migrant rights group Centro de los Derechos del Migrante shows that it's common for H-2A employers nationwide to intimidate workers to exert greater control over them and prevent them from feeling safe enough to speak up while they’re employed. Out of 100 former H-2A workers the organization spoke to, 100% of them experienced at least one serious legal violation and 94% experienced three or more serious legal violations.
Rice from CRLA points out that H-2A employers have an incredible amount of control over workers. An employer must provide housing, meals and transportation to and from the work site. Because many workers don’t have a U.S. driver’s license or their own vehicle, they also depend on their bosses for transportation to go grocery shopping, to receive medical care and for other essential activities.
“A worker who is experiencing bad working conditions can always vote with his or her feet, right?” Rice said. “Well, that's not true for H-2A workers.”
“The program is really closer to a kind of indentured servitude that we had in prior decades under sharecropper relationships post-emancipation,” she added. “There is such a dependency that the worker has on the employer and you can't really say that they're free to engage in activity anywhere else.”
Abusive employers can exert control over workers even when they are no longer living in the U.S. In order to find employees, many H-2A employers depend on third-party recruiters that operate all over the world. The recruitment process is rife with abuse, as some recruiters charge workers exorbitant amounts to connect them with American companies, some practice debt bondage and others mislead workers entirely about job opportunities. Additionally, a 2015 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that recruiters often blacklist any worker who speaks up about abuses to their employer.
These recruiters, which range from informal one-person operations to multinational corporations, usually work for several employers spread out across the U.S. So when recruiters blacklist a worker, they’re not just doing so for one employer but potentially for whole sectors of the agriculture industry.
Rice has seen this happen several times with clients who spoke up about an employer in one state, only to later have trouble finding a job in other states.
“The first thing that the employer does once a worker has complained about wages or working conditions,” she said, “is go back to the recruiter and say, ‘I don't want to hire this guy next year because they complained about me,’ and that affects not only recruitment for that particular employer, but also for all of the employers that a recruiter has a relationship with.”
Even when workers have returned to their countries of origin, the possibility of being blacklisted still exists. In the 2015 GAO report, federal officials traveled to Mexico to talk to former H-2A workers and noted that laborers were concerned about being seen talking to U.S. investigators in their hometowns because “people walking by could possibly see and report them to the local recruiter.”
The United Farm Workers union, which operates nationwide, also has noticed this phenomenon. Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns with the UFW, said many Jamaican H-2A workers in the U.S. will stick it out with a bad employer for a whole year just to stay within the recruitment pool for the next year. “There is also a tremendous amount of control over access to those visas [exerted by recruiters] within the communities of origin,” she said.
When Mauritson Farms first hired their crew in 2019, Samuel and Kevin say that the company arranged the recruitment process directly, using WhatsApp to coordinate. But in 2022, the vineyard switched to using a third-party recruiter, Cierto Global, a multinational farm labor contractor that was dubbed an “ethical recruiter” by the Biden administration earlier this year.
But Samuel and Kevin still worry that they now will have a much harder time finding a job in agriculture in the U.S. “I think [Mauritson] didn’t want any more problems to come up for them anymore,” Kevin said, “so they brought on the recruiter to be more selective.”
Regulating the recruiter network
How can labor officials prevent retaliation by American companies against H-2A workers if it happens outside the U.S.?
The GAO report points out that because recruitment happens outside the U.S., there’s very little federal oversight. Although the Department of Homeland Security keeps track of every incoming H-2A immigrant, there's no federal database that tracks which agents are recruiting them.
State agencies like California’s ALRB, which is currently investigating the Mauritson case, also have a hard time enforcing anti-retaliation laws in these situations. Regional director Jessica Arciniega shared that these types of situations are difficult for her agency due to jurisdictional limitations, but in certain cases, this sort of retaliation can fit into an ongoing unfair labor practice investigation.
“If there is evidence that the recruiter was an agent of the employer, then it may be part of something that we investigate,” she said.
At the federal level, Department of Labor officials are constrained by their jurisdiction. “Our enforcement authority is just in the United States. We can't regulate what these third-party recruiters are doing, let's just say, in Mexico,” said Ruben Lugo, regional enforcement coordinator.
However, Lugo explains, if a group of workers reported a breach of contract to the Department of Labor by their employer, and the following year none of the workers who were cooperating with the investigation were rehired, “then we can clearly discern that these workers were retaliated [against].”
In this situation, the federal government can order the employer to rehire the affected workers. In cases involving wage theft, officials also can require companies to pay back what they owe workers, along with civil penalties. For repeat offenders, authorities can even remove an employer from the H-2A program.
But at the end of the day, these consequences apply only for agriculture companies in the U.S., not recruiters abroad. In 2018, over 90% of H-2A workers were from Mexico and the 2018 GOA report shows that the recruiter network operates extensively throughout that country.
Migrant worker advocates argue that the Mexican government, along with the governments of other countries H-2A immigrants travel from, should be more proactive about regulating the activities of these recruiters and educating workers on what their labor rights are before they leave for the U.S.
But Mexican officials KQED spoke to pushed back, arguing that isn’t the responsibility of the Mexican government — despite millions of dollars flowing back to Mexico each year as remittances from Mexican nationals working for the U.S. agriculture industry.
“H-2A visas are not part of a binational program,” said Remedios Gómez Arnau, consul general of Mexico in San Francisco. The Mexican government has no part in the hiring process and only plays a role through its consular system once Mexican nationals are in American territory, she added.
“Once somebody leaves Mexico and enters another country using a visa, then that’s when we can figure out here if the national approaches a consulate and tells us what their issue is,” she said. “But before that, Mexican authorities don’t know who is being hired by who.”
'The way we protect workers must change'
Samuel and Kevin don’t regret speaking up.
“We’re acting within our rights,” Samuel said. “It’s not just one worker who spoke up but many.”
For the team at North Bay Jobs With Justice who have been working with this group of workers since last year, this case could set a precedent for the fight to protect farmworkers in wine country and the rest of California against retaliation and unsafe labor practices.
If the ALRB finds that Mauritson did retaliate against its workers, that could encourage other workers across the region to report their own experiences to labor officials, said Ana Salgado, community co-chair of the NBJWJ board. That could potentially fuel the movement for greater worker protections ahead of wildfire season.
A coalition of worker advocacy groups, including NBJWJ, have pushed Sonoma County officials for months to put into place five safety standards meant to protect workers as wildfires intensify due to climate change. These include providing safety and fire evacuation training in the workers’ first languages, including Indigenous languages, and allowing independent community observers to assess the safety of workers out in the field, so that workers are not alone when they report unsafe conditions.
“The Earth is changing, and the way we protect workers must change as well,” said Salgado in Spanish.
Beyond Sonoma County, migrant rights advocates also are proposing structural reforms to the H-2A program to hold both employers and recruiters accountable for retaliation. Centro de los Derechos del Migrante has recommended that Congress approve legislation that reforms the recruitment process and ensures that workers who have suffered a labor rights violation in the U.S. can still access legal services once they’ve left the country. They’re also encouraging federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, to create a database accessible to workers that keeps track of H-2A employers and their recruiters.
Cynthia Rice, attorney with the CRLA, points out a loophole in the existing accountability mechanism for H-2A employers: When a worker sues their company for an illegal labor practice, that company can settle the lawsuit and avoid admitting they violated labor law.
“Because there has not been any admission of liability or wrongdoing, that employer can get another H-2A order the next year,” Rice said. If federal officials took into consideration which companies are settling lawsuits year after year when it decides which ones get to stay in the H-2A program, it could prevent employers who don’t protect their workers from staying.
Reforming the program isn’t just necessary to better protect H-2A workers, Rice said, but also would benefit American workers. When H-2A workers are more vulnerable to retaliation, that makes them more attractive to hire, since employers know they can exploit them without having to fear the same consequences they’d face in hiring Americans.
While he waits to hear the ALRB’s decision, Kevin has been sharing everything he’s learned in the past year with friends who are considering working in the U.S. He doesn’t want others to go through the same things he did.
“We were happy with the job we had over there because it gave us the economic means to send money back to our families and save for a home or a business,” he said. But he added that doesn’t justify how he was treated: “We felt awful with the abuse we received, so we set out to learn what the employer actually needs to do.”
Emmett Till. (photo: The Daily Beast)
Decades later, a white woman whose accusations led to the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till may finally face arrest for her role in the brutal killing.
That’s because an unserved arrest warrant from 1955 for Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman who accused Till of the flirting (a crime for Black men, at the time), was discovered in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse this week.
The discovery has led Till’s extended family and civil rights activists to push the district attorney in Leflore County, Mississippi (where the incident occurred) and in Raleigh, North Carolina (where Donham was last known to live) to take action and arrest the 87-year-old woman.
“We would certainly see that she is brought to justice,” Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman told the News & Observer.
Both district attorneys would need to cooperate in order to arrest Donham, Freeman said, but she encouraged Mississippi authorities to do their “due diligence” and find out why, exactly, Donham wasn’t arrested all those years ago.
If an arrest and trial were to come to fruition, it’s pertinent that Donham has admitted to fabricating the accusations that led to Till’s death, telling a historian in 2017, “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
Till was just 14 when he was murdered.
A motorist drives between flowers along the Angeles Crest Highway in the Angeles National Forest northwest of La Canada, Calif. (photo: David McNew/Getty Images)
The wide open roads, the wind in your hair, the feeling of freedom when you drive. Cars have been celebrated in movies and eternalized in songs for evoking all that.
And right now, that feeling of freedom comes with a pretty hefty price tag. The average monthly car payment crossed $700 a month earlier this year, the highest on record, according to Cox Automotive/Moody's Analytics.
"I joke with people that every new car purchase is a luxury car purchase, I don't care what you're buying," says Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights at the car buying expert Edmunds.
However, cars aren't just a symbol of freedom.
In fact, they play an essential role in the economy. People rely on cars to get to work — 3 out of 4 Americans commute to work by car. Then there's school drop-offs, doctors appointments, grocery shopping and more.
And yet, for more and more Americans owning a car is becoming unaffordable.
"Unfortunately for the segment of the population that probably needs it the most, it's getting more and more out of reach," Drury notes.
Indeed, that high dollar figure doesn't even account for insurance or parking for those who have to pay for it. Not to mention gas prices that crossed $5 a gallon recently and are still hovering near these record levels.
There's also no end in sight in an era when interest rates are rising and the cost of borrowing will likely go up even more.
What's causing prices to spike?
The primary reason cars have gotten so pricey can be traced back to the computer chip shortage that started during the pandemic.
When car sales dropped dramatically during the early parts of the lockdown, auto manufacturers slashed orders for the chips.
Around the same time, as schools and work went online, people bought additional laptops, iPads, TVs, video games and other electronic goods for their home. So chip manufacturers shifted their production to serve those companies.
Automakers are making more expensive cars
This was soon followed by other big shifts in the economy. People started moving out of crowded cities into suburban locations, and suddenly demand for cars skyrocketed.
Auto manufacturers were caught flatfooted and unable to make enough cars because they didn't have enough microchips, which play a big role in today's cars, controlling everything from windows to the navigation screen to even passenger seat sensors.
With a limited supply of chips, automakers cut back and made fewer cars. They decided to put their chips into making bigger, more expensive vehicles — SUVs loaded with features — to get more bang for their buck.
That also means that automakers have been making fewer compact cars and sedans, the more affordable vehicles.
The average cost of a new car has topped $47,000
The result is that prices have climbed to astronomical levels. The average cost of a new car is hovering at the highest level on record, topping $47,000 a pop.
Drury says get used to these prices: "We're not going to see a sudden drop-off in price anytime soon, because there doesn't seem to be any resolution for the chip crisis."
And used cars? Forget it. They're just as unaffordable
Those who have sought respite by buying used cars are also facing sticker shock.
Used car prices have shot up even more dramatically than new car prices, up 16.1% from a year ago compared to a 12.6% jump in new car prices.
Johnny Navarro experienced that sticker shock firsthand after a recent car accident. No one was hurt, but his car was totaled. When he went to the dealership, he found monthly payments had doubled for cars he'd looked at only a few years earlier.
"To see it jump from like $300 to $600 for a Corolla or Civic was like, I should be driving like a Mustang for that much money, you know?" Navarro said incredulously.
But people still love their cars
After a lot of shopping, Navarro found a used Lexus online. His car payment came out to $580 a month, over $200 more per month than he used to pay. That's before adding in his insurance bill and parking fees in downtown Los Angeles, where he lives.
"I'm definitely gonna have to probably pick up a shift or two more a week," Navarro says, referring to his job as a server at a restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. Driving cuts his hourlong commute in half, but it's not the only reason he got the car.
"I just like to ride in my car with friends and listen to music. I actually have a carpool karaoke microphone," he says. "That's always really fun."
Navarro is like a lot of Americans — he loves his car. For as long as he can afford it, he's going to own one.
NanoAvionics used a GoPro Hero 7 mounted on a selfie stick to take the first-ever 4K resolution full satellite selfie in space with an immersive view of Earth. (photo: NanoAvionics)
“The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” Command Module pilot Jim Lovell, one of three astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission responsible for the photo, said of the view, according to NASA.
Now, a satellite company is looking to inspire a similar reaction with an innovative selfie. The company, NanoAvionics, recorded the first-ever 4K satellite selfie from space with the Great Barrier Reef in the background.
“The reason for taking the photo and video clip with the Great Barrier Reef in the background was partly symbolic,” NanoAvionics co-founder and CEO Vytenis J. Buzas said in the press release. “We wanted to highlight the vulnerability of our planet and the importance of Earth observation by satellites, especially for monitoring environment and climate changes.”
The Great Barrier Reef is the only living structure visible from space. It is also extremely vulnerable to the climate crisis. The reef has experienced six mass bleachings — which occur due to high ocean temperatures — since 1998 and four since 2016. The most recent, in the Australian summer of 2021-2022, impacted more than 90 percent of the corals.
“Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide,” the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has declared.
Satellite imagery is an important tool for understanding and, therefore, protecting coral reefs. In 2021, for example, almost two million satellite imagery enabled the Allen Coral Atlas, the first-ever high resolution map of the world’s coral reefs.
The NanoAvionics satellite selfie was taken with relatively simple technology that anyone can buy: a GoPro Hero 7. The company then attached the camera to a custom-built selfie stick for the shot, according to Gizmodo. The results were 12-megapixel photos and 4K video clips, according to the press release.
“In our increasingly visual culture, it is important for investors, students, customers and the general public to see in order to believe. Millions watch rocket launches but barely see satellites moving in orbit or deployable structures in operation. This is going to change through live or recorded footage,” Buzas said in the release.
Seeing was believing in the case of Earthrise as well.
“It… became a blinding confirmation that our Earth, floating in a sea of stars, was vulnerable and needed protecting,” Earth Day Network President Kathleen Rogers wrote in USA Today. “The Earth looked so perfect, so radiant, so small.”
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