17 August 22
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It centers on Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who signed the FBI's search warrant. As his name became public, he has faced a withering volume of threats from those who believe Trump should be above the law. In today’s America, with the MAGA crowd revved up for attack, that was to be expected. But that attacks were to be expected should not obscure the fact that they are dangerous. Very. The possibility of their leading to violence should not be underestimated.
Many of these threats focused on the fact that Judge Reinhart is Jewish. It got to the point that the synagogue where Judge Reinhart sits on the board had to cancel Shabbat services:
"Temple Beth David in South Florida has canceled its Beach Shabbat this week under a deluge of antisemitic threats about Bruce Reinhart, the judge who signed the Mar-a-Lago search warrant and sits on the synagogue’s board." https://t.co/3e8h1Bp7hw
— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) August 12, 2022
Antisemitism is on the rise in America, as those who track such nefarious trends will tell you. It can be found in some form across the political spectrum, but it has become a particular hallmark of elements of the Republican Party, especially in the age of Trump.
In the wake of the FBI search, the New York Young Republican Club resorted to well-worn antisemitic tropes, for example. “Internationalist forces and their allies intent on undermining the foundation of our Republic have crossed the Rubicon,” read their statement, in part. The conspiracy theory that Trump is being thwarted by a global cabal of “elites” funded by “George Soros” in ways that will undermine traditional American “values” represents coded language (and by "coded," I mean as subtle as a marching band through a library) that is pushing a dangerous line of attack. Dangerous on a personal level and dangerous for our country as a whole.
While there are extreme fringe groups who speak bluntly and declaratively of hating Jews, most American antisemitism is less obvious. Republican supporters of Trump say they can’t possibly be antisemitic because Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is Jewish, as were many members of his administration. They say Republicans have strong supporters in Israel, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They point to Democratic politicians who have been critical of Israel, or others with ties to more overt antisemites.
All of this is true. But it is not an excuse for what is taking place now.
It should be noted with emphasis that antisemitism isn’t limited to one political party or ideology. Furthermore, the Israel issue complicates the discussion, because criticism of Israel as a country is not necessarily antisemitic. Many American Jews object to Israeli policy. But there are also ways Israel is spoken of that clearly cross into antisemitic language.
It is impossible in a column such as this to parse the morass of antisemitism in America. But it is vital that we see how the fundamental rhetoric that has propelled antisemitism over many centuries around the globe helps fuel the larger Trump movement. This is about the “othering” of Americans who don't support Trump. It is about dividing the country into “us” and “them.” It is about claiming that only those who back the former president are “patriotic.”
What the Trumpification of the Republican Party has achieved (though we recognize that some of this existed prior to Trump) is labeling two Americas, one “real” and one supposedly not. And that is the purpose of all this Soros and internationalist talk: scapegoating. It tells people that they can and should direct their anger, which can easily escalate to violence, at those who are “different.” And those people are often Jews, or Black people, or people of Asian or Hispanic heritage, or LGBTQ+ folks, or other groups considered not sufficiently “American.” The fact that it isn’t all Jews or all Black people (the GOP lionizes Clarence Thomas, after all) doesn’t excuse the larger message.
We should be on guard not to make imperfect analogies to the past. For numerous reasons, I do not believe we are on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany. But that doesn't mean we don't face great peril. As soon as we start playing to stereotypes, as soon as we interpret people’s race, religion, or other background demographics as a measure of their worth as citizens or humans, we risk destroying our society.
It is sickening. It is vile. It is menacing to America’s historic mission as a citadel of freedom and high ideals. So it is incumbent on citizens with decent intentions to speak up. “Never again” doesn’t mean only that we must do all we can to avoid another Holocaust. It means never again shall we be silent. Never again shall we look the other way. Never again shall we allow hate to take deep root.
Of course, hate has always been a part of the human experience. It has wreaked havoc across history, causing the pain, suffering, and death of countless people. It is fueled by seeing others as enemies rather than as fellow members of the human species.
Antisemitism is one virulent manifestation of this "us vs. them" mindset. To survive and thrive, America must reject it in all of its forms.
I’m often asked by people who love their country but are worried about its future, “But what can one person do to make any difference?” My answer usually begins with, “Make sure you vote, work to get others to vote…ask yourself how you can help another person and help your community.” Speaking out against antisemitism, teaching the young its dangers and the dangers of hate more generally, is a worthwhile addition to this list.
These are the actions of poorly educated ARMED WHITE DOMESTIC TERRORISTS who don't respect the obligations of the law and jeopardize the safety of law abiding Americans.
The prosecution of a Dim Wit needs to proceed.
We'll never know what he destroyed, gave away, flushed down the toilet.
THEY - ALL OF THEM - need to be prosecuted!
FROM OCCUPY DEMOCRATS:
Trump supporters bombard judge who approved Mar-a-Lago search with death threats
US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart has faced a storm of death threats since his signature earlier this month cleared the way for the FBI to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to recover classified materials illegally removed from the White House. Reinhart’s home address was posted on various right-wing sites, along with vile, antisemitic slurs.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/donald-trump-supporters-send-death-threats-to-judge-who-approved-mar-a-lago-search
Did KUSHNER sell NUCLEAR SECRETS to the SAUDIS?
Before THREATENING, ask questions.
Did KUSHNER betray the nation?
How Did Jared Kushner Get $2 Billion From the Saudis?
Hint: It’s not because of his track record as an investor.
President Donald Trump exits a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 2019, in New York City. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
Aides to the former president described a chaotic process that was colored by the boss’ desire to keep litigating the election and retain his own mementos.
Trump-themed accessories and memorabilia were snagged. Aides stood in empty offices and tried to find a moment to secure presidential greetings for a loved one’s upcoming birthday or anniversary.
It was part free-for-all, part fire sale. Souvenirs were kept, records were indiscriminately thrown away. The Oval Office and its adjacent private dining room were only packed up the weekend before former President Donald Trump moved out, former aides said.
So-called “burn bags” were widely present, according to two former Trump White House officials, with red stripes marking ones that held sensitive classified material meant to be destroyed. Such bags, according to Mark Zaid, an attorney well-steeped in national security law, are common. But one former official said that staff would put seemingly non-classified items in there too, such as handwritten letters and notes passed to principals. Zaid said it wasn’t necessarily improper to dispose of non-classified information this way, provided it was done under the confines of the law. But those who observed the process later conceded that it was not entirely clear if documents should have been headed to the National Archives instead of the incinerator.
It was in those tumultuous moments that — investigators allege — boxes containing classified material were packed and sent to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Nineteen months later, Trump’s handling of presidential records and West Wing material has landed him in unprecedented legal peril. Last week, the FBI resorted to getting a warrant to retrieve those items, which, the bureau said, included four sets of top-secret documents and seven other sets of classified information.
But his approach to those final days was often echoed throughout the White House, as recounted in interviews with more than a dozen ex-White House officials and advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly describe the last days.
The final, frenzied pack up of Trump’s 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. began in earnest as the president was consumed with other matters: the aftermath of the January 6 riot and the impending impeachment. Norms and protocols were cast aside. Everything was running late, including the General Services Administration’s formal acknowledgment of a transition of power.
“We were 30 days behind what a typical administration would be,” recalled one former top Trump aide.
Throughout the months of December and January, administration officials were given guidance by the White House counsel’s office on how to abide by the Presidential Records Act, the post-Watergate law that dictates the procedures and processes for preserving government documents. There was professional staff that helped manage the IT systems and National Archives and Records Administration embeds who reminded aides about record preservation.
Staff also began offboarding — leaving an increasing pile of work to a dwindling number of aides. Some of them were bitter and exhausted and displayed little desire or inclination to help an incoming administration that their boss claimed stole the election.
“Part of the MAGA movement is kind of a ‘fuck you’ to the government bureaucracy, which you can interpret as the Deep State,” said one former Trump staffer. “People were really dissatisfied with the transition and the outcome of the election. This is the last piece of control that they had [while] in power.”
The weeks after the November elections were among the more chaotic for a Trump White House that had been defined by chaos. The West Wing was left reeling by Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and the president’s refusal to concede largely froze the transition process in place.
Some aides recalled that staff secretary Derek Lyons attempted to maintain a semblance of order in the West Wing despite the election uncertainty. But he departed the administration in late December, leaving the task of preserving the needed records for the National Archives to others. The two men atop the office hierarchy — then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump — took little interest in it, aides and advisers recalled. Meanwhile, responsibility for overseeing the pack up of the outer Oval and dining room, an area where Trump liked to work when not in the Oval Office, was left to Trump’s assistants, Molly Michael and Nick Luna, according to multiple former aides.
A spokesperson for Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment for the story. A person close to Meadows insisted that, “All procedures were followed in accordance with guidance.”
Open government groups were already, by that point, trying to force the administration’s hand to preserve its records. Tom Blanton, director of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University — one of those groups pressing the White House — explicitly said that the goal was to “prevent a bonfire in the Rose Garden.” He and others were concerned by reports that White House staff and outside advisers were using personal email, WhatsApp and disappearing messages.
There was also a belief that Trump simply didn’t care for the law around records preservation.
“The counsel’s office was often working at cross-purposes with the way President Trump treated records,” Blanton said. “To Trump, the White House was another casino he had bought. This one was just on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Trump has long loved to collect and display items that remind him and others of his personal feats. His golf courses and the office in Trump Tower are cluttered with photos, magazine covers featuring him, and souvenirs attesting to the perks of his wealth and fame. Whatever he didn’t want was usually whisked away with little regard. Indeed, as he worked in the Oval Office, Trump would end each day pushing the materials from his desk into a cardboard box that, once filled, would be sent off and replaced, according to two former officials.
Often, Trump would call for aides to bring him a souvenir — a letter from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un was a particular favorite — and he’d delight in showing off for guests.
Under investigation for possible violations of the Espionage Act and other laws, Trump has denied wrongdoing while offering shifting explanations for the presence of the material at Mar-a-Lago. Aides said they recalled very few conversations during the transition about what to do with the documents that Trump would, on occasion, bring up to the White House residence.
As for the broader transition, a handful of Trump White House aides argued that the process of sorting and storing government records, returning equipment and discharging staffers of their security clearances, was clearly outlined by the counsel’s office and done with care.
“You sign all this stuff when you start, you’ve already been told here’s how the Presidential Records Act works, here’s what it says, here’s what it means, as far as what we expected,” said one former Trump White House official. “It seemed very routine.”
But most aides described a haphazard process as Inauguration Day approached. Lawyers would send around guidance when the staffers should pack up and how it should be done, but “they weren’t going to go through paper by paper,” one former staffer recalled.
“It was just drawer by drawer,” the person said. “It’s not a scientific process. You don’t have someone breathing down your neck looking at what you were taking.”
That stood in marked contrast to the process put in place by Trump’s predecessor. President Barack Obama’s administration, facing term limits, knew it was leaving and began the transition in August 2016, according to Neil Eggleston, former Obama White House counsel. Beyond that, they didn’t regard the rules around record retention as vague.
“It was very clear that they were not permitted to take any government property with them and that included any government documents created in the White House, anything related to their official jobs in the White House,” he said. “And nobody ever fought us on it, it was never an issue. ... The rule that you couldn’t take government documents was a clear rule.”
Trump, Eggleston surmised, was a victim of his own political impulses. “[H]e denied being defeated so they didn’t really engage in a transition process because he refused to let it happen,” he said. “So that meant that they were in a fairly frantic situation as the inauguration day came.”
For outgoing White Houses, there is typically a debriefing process about classified documents, and then a procedure to turn over government phones and computers. But for many of the last Trump holdouts, that process came after the Capitol riot, a stunning day of violence which triggered heightened security throughout Washington. The security obstacles erected around the White House, aides recalled, created more logistical hurdles for an already exhausted and hollowed-out staff.
Sloppiness ensued in many departments. Many staffers seemed more interested in securing copies of “jumbos” — the giant photos that adorned the West Wing’s walls — than sorting and packing up their files. Those who stayed focused on juggling the operational demands of running a country with the political whims of a president who, until just days before, was trying to cling to power.
There was, simply, not much care for protocol.
“Compared to previous administrations of both parties,” conceded a person familiar with the process, “there was less of a willingness to adhere to the Presidential Records Act.”
David Cay Johnston wrote books about tRump that are well worth reading.
The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and dean of Trumpologists David Cay Johnston reveals years of eye-popping financial misdeeds by Donald Trump and his family.
While the world watched Donald Trump’s presidency in horror or delight, few noticed that his lifelong grifting quietly continued. Less than forty minutes after taking the oath of office, Trump began turning the White House into a money machine for himself, his family, and his courtiers.
More than $1.7 billion flowed into Donald Trump’s bank accounts during his four years as president. Foreign governments rented out whole floors of his hotel five blocks from the White House while lobbyists conducted business in the hotel’s restaurants. Payday lenders and other trade groups moved their annual conventions to Trump golf resorts. And individual favor seekers joined his private Mar-a-Lago club with its $200,000 admission fee in hopes of getting a few minutes with the President. Despite earning more than $1 million every day he was in office, Trump left the White House as he arrived—hard up for cash. More than $400 million in debt comes due by 2024, and Trump still lacks the resources to pay it back.
“Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston” (The Washington Post), and The Big Cheat offers a guided tour of how money flowed in and out of Trump’s hundreds of enterprises, showing in simple terms how a corrupt president used our government for his benefit, even putting national security at risk. Johnston details the four most recent years of the corruption that has defined the Trump family since 1885 and reveals the costs of Trump’s extravagant lifestyle for American taxpayers.
It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America
The Trump administration is remaking the government. It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America tells us exactly how it is making America worse again.
Bestselling author and longtime Trump observer David Cay Johnston shines a light on the political termites who have infested our government under the Trump Administration, destroying it from within and compromising our jobs, safety, finances, and more.
No journalist knows Donald Trump better than David Cay Johnston, who has been following him since 1988. It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America goes inside the administration to show how the federal agencies that touch the lives of all Americans are being undermined. Here is just some of what you will learn:
The Wall. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto told President Trump that Mexico will never pay for the border wall. So, Trump is proposing putting a tariff on Mexican imports. But a tariff will simply raise the price of Mexican goods in the US, meaning American consumers will end up paying for the wall—if it ever gets built.
Climate Change. Welcome to the new EPA, run by Scott Pruitt, a lawyer who has spent much of his career trying to destroy the agency he now heads. Secrecy reigns at the new EPA because Pruitt meets with industry executives to find out which clean air and clean water provisions they most want to roll back, and keeps staffers in the dark to make sure these pro-pollution plans don’t leak prematurely.
Stocking the Swamp. Contrary to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC, Trump has filled his cabinet with millionaires and billionaires, from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs and hedge fund veteran who made much of his fortune foreclosing on homeowners to billionaire heiress Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has already put the interests of bankers ahead of debt-burdened students and their families.
The Kleptocracy. Under Donald Trump conflict of interest is passé. When Trump isn’t in Washington, he stays at one of his properties, where the taxpayers pick up the tab for staffers, Secret Service, and so on, all at full price. And back in Washington, everyone now knows that the Trump International Hotel is the only place to stay if you want to do business with the administration. Meanwhile sons Donald Jr. and Eric run an eyes-wide-open blind trust of Trump holdings to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest—but not the reality.
Temples of Chance
"Gambling is inevitable," declared the Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling in the mid-1970s. Less than 20 years later, Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, finds that commercial gambling backed by such business moguls as Donald Trump, Merv Griffin and Steve Wynn and by such corporations as Holiday Inn, Ramada and Hilton has made profits the Mafia never even dreamed of when it controlled Las Vegas. Johnston's hard-edged, sobering account traces the questionable megabuck financial deals that support gambling's increasing popularity in America and indicts corporate and government organizations for encouraging minors to drink and gamble and for coddling high-rollers and money-mongers. An eye-opening expose.
Migrants are lined up and processed by Border Patrol north of the Roma-Ciudad Miguel Aleman International Bridge in Roma, Texas, October 1, 2021. (photo: Jason Garza/Reuters)
Lucy, who is not being fully identified because of family members still in danger, said that a Border Patrol agent attacked her when she was apprehended in the Imperial Valley desert. But the agent instead claimed she had assaulted him, and he pushed for a felony prosecution.
Because she was being charged with a crime, she was separated from her children.
Though the prosecutor later dropped the charges against her, it was too late for Lucy and her family — they had already been split apart.
“I didn’t know that this was going to happen. It hurt me so much to be separated from my children,” Lucy said in Spanish. “It’s horrible.”
And though the federal government is supposed to work to reunite families separated at the border once criminal prosecutions have concluded — or in this case dismissed — that doesn’t appear to have happened in this case.
She remained apart from her 10-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son for about five months until three legal services organizations got involved in her case. Her 18-year-old stepson was sent back to El Salvador, so she is still separated from him.
“The reunification that happened was only possible through the help of the attorneys and the organizations,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney with the UC Los Angeles Center for Immigration Law and Policy. “The government agencies are not the ones who facilitated that.”
The Trump administration used family separations at the border as a way to discourage migration. But stories of small children being ripped away from their parents and held in Border Patrol holding cells alone led to a public outcry — and a federal lawsuit in San Diego that pushed the Trump administration to work to reunite more than 1,000 children who remained separated from their parents.
Though President Joe Biden railed against the Trump administration’s policies that caused mass separation of parents and children at the border, family members are still being separated under some circumstances, including if a parent has a criminal history, has health issue, or is being criminally prosecuted.
The judge in the federal lawsuit ruled that if parents were going to be prosecuted criminally, then the government must work to quickly reunite those migrants with their children once the criminal cases had concluded.
About 13 percent of the family separations from January through May of this year were because parents were referred for criminal prosecutions, according to reports from the Department of Health and Human Services.
A demand for protection
On Tuesday, the organizations that helped Lucy in her case — the UC Los Angeles Center for Immigration Law and Policy, Jewish Family Service of San Diego and the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties — sent a letter to the head of the Department of Homeland Security using what happened to her family as an example to urge the Biden administration to do more to prevent further family separations and to work to reunite those it has separated.
Part of that, they argue, can be addressed by the Biden administration taking a stronger stance against separations of asylum-seeking families overall and to implement a series of policy changes that do not require acts of Congress.
While the Biden administration has convened a task force to address family separation, it only covers parents and children who were split apart under former President Donald Trump. It is not able to work on separation cases that have happened more recently. The letter asks the administration to change that.
“Just because this hasn’t been covered in the news as it was in 2018, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening anymore,” said Esmeralda Flores, an attorney with the ACLU. “We hope for them to expand and include protections for families that we see are still being separated and are still being harmed by these awful policies.”
The letter also asks the administration to do more to keep parents and their adult children together and to keep spouses together whether they have children or not.
Two of those organizations similarly sent a letter in July 2021 calling attention to continued family separations under the Biden administration and highlighting the case of a pregnant woman whose partner was separated from her and detained. The man was unable to be with her when she gave birth.
The Department of Homeland Security said it could not comment on specific separation cases for privacy reasons.
“Since day one of the Biden Administration, DHS has worked to reverse the cruel family separations of the Trump Administration,” said spokesperson Marsha Espinosa. “Children are not separated from their parents unless there is a medical emergency, child welfare concerns, or public safety concerns, including a serious criminal background, warrant or referral for prosecution, or national security interests.”
In fiscal 2021, Border Patrol agents conducted 227 family separations, including five along the California border, according to a DHS report to Congress.
Lucy’s daughter was among 54 minor children separated from their parents or legal guardians during the first five months of this year who ended up in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement as “unaccompanied minors,” according to the reports from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Nearly half of the children separated during that period were age 5 and under.
“Family separation should never happen at the border, and asylum seekers should be treated with dignity,” said Luis Gonzalez, an attorney with Jewish Family Service. “No mother and minor child should have to undergo the severe trauma that comes with family separation.”
A family scattered
Lucy and her family know that trauma all too well.
In February, Lucy and her children crossed the eastern California border after fleeing death threats in El Salvador, according to her attorney. They were with a group of other migrants resting along a train line in Calipatria — a city about 35 miles north of Calexico — on Feb. 14 when Border Patrol agents found them.
Lucy said she went to wake up her 18-year-old son Anner as the other migrants fled. A Border Patrol agent caught her and began beating her, she said.
“The truth is I thought he was going to kill me because he had hit me so much,” she told the Union-Tribune.
Her children watched in horror and begged another agent to get him to stop, she said, but the other agent said that he couldn’t because of who the agent attacking her was.
Lucy, who is less than 5 feet tall, attempted to free herself from the agent to save herself, she said. Anner threw a couple of rocks near the agent to try to get him to stop.
The agent did stop, and Lucy escaped to where the other agent was standing with her children, she said.
They were taken to a Border Patrol station, and though Lucy was bleeding from the head and lip and already quite bruised, she did not receive medical attention, she said.
She recalled the agents bullying her and laughing at her.
She was placed in a holding area with her daughter, but soon agents came to take Lucy away. It would be more than a month before she even had an idea of where her daughter ended up.
“They didn’t even give me a chance to say goodbye,” Lucy said. “They took me out and handcuffed me.”
She was taken to a federal facility in Arizona to wait because she was being charged with assaulting and intimidating the agent that she says attacked her, a felony. Anner was charged with a misdemeanor and held in another facility.
The FBI agent who investigated the incident noted in a court filing that Anner told him that the Border Patrol agent was punching his mother.
In May, the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked the judge to dismiss the charges, and the case was dropped.
Customs and Border Protection, when asked to comment on Lucy’s case or allegations about agent conduct, deferred inquiries to DHS.
After her charges were dropped, Lucy was transferred to an immigration detention facility.
At that point, she and Anner were both at Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, but they were unable to see each other. They communicated via letters while inside, Lucy recalled.
She thought she would never see her 10-year-old girl again.
“Instead of reunifying her immediately after that case was dismissed, the federal government transferred her and her 18-year-old son to long-term ICE detention which obviously prolonged the separation,” said Langarica, the UC Los Angeles attorney.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees immigration detention and custody determinations as well as deportations, said that it allowed Lucy a parental phone call in coordination with its Juvenile and Family Residential Management Unit in early June.
“ICE is committed to the safe, effective, and humane enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws,” said spokesperson Paige Hughes. “As part of this commitment, ICE will take actions aimed at ensuring the fundamental interests of parents, legal guardians, and their minor children or incapacitated adults for whom they serve as legal guardians impacted by civil enforcement activities, as detailed in ICE detained parental directive.”
Hughes said that ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis.
‘This hell had finally ended’
Attorneys with UC Los Angeles and the ACLU met Lucy during a legal orientation visit at the detention facility and offered to help, and Jewish Family Service got involved as well.
“That was when I felt that there was hope,” Lucy said. She’d become extremely depressed waiting alone for months in custody.
A few weeks later, on July 12, both Lucy and Anner were released from detention, though at different times and locations. Jewish Family Service sent someone to pick them up.
Lucy recalled getting dropped off at a bus station and hearing her son yelling for her.
“I said, ‘Thank God, we are free,’ and my son hugged me very tight and started to cry,” Lucy said, her face lighting up as she remembered the moment. “I told him not to cry because this hell had finally ended.”
Anner doesn’t like to remember the time they spent apart. When asked if he wanted to add anything to his mother’s account of what happened to them, he became too overwhelmed with emotion to speak.
The two went to the San Diego Rapid Response Network Migrant Shelter and then to Los Angeles to reunite with Lucy’s daughter, who had been released from government custody to stay with a cousin.
Mother and daughter, too, had a tearful reunion.
“When she saw me, she didn’t recognize me very well, and she started to cry,” Lucy said. “I also cried, and she said, ‘Mommy, don’t cry. Your nightmare has ended. Now we’re going to be happy.’”
The family of three now rents a small room in Los Angeles while they wait to find out of they qualify for asylum. Jewish Family Service is representing both Lucy and Anner in their cases. Because the daughter was separated from them, she has a different attorney who took her case when she was considered unaccompanied.
The stepson who was sent back to El Salvador is living in hiding, as are Lucy’s other son, 16, and stepson, 17. She didn’t have the resources to bring them all with her.
Langarica said that it’s not clear whether the stepson was given a chance to request protection from the dangers back home.
“We sadly have very little information about the circumstances of that deportation and whether he had a fair opportunity,” Langarica said. “The lack of information leads us to believe that he did not.”
Lucy hopes that if she’s able to win her asylum case, she’ll be able to reunite with all of her children in the United States.
This is failed US/CIA foreign policy that created these tragedies and there is no indication that the policies will improve.
Thank the senile pResident and War Criminals like Elliot Abrams, but you got your cheap bananas,sugar and coffee.
excerpt:
The Tragic Life of the War Criminal Elliott Abrams
Elliott Abrams once said the animating force behind his and Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was that the world is “an exceedingly dangerous place.” And this is true, largely because men like Elliott Abrams exist in it.
Last month, Abrams was tapped by Trump to serve as his special envoy to Venezuela, to essentially help steer the Trump administration’s slow-burn effort to topple that country’s government — or as Mike Pompeo put it, “restore democracy” in the country.
https://jacobin.com/2019/02/the-tragic-life-of-the-war-criminal-elliott-abrams
Peter Lucido in 2019. (photo: David Eggert/AP)
In Michigan, local officials are eager to enforce a pre-Roe abortion ban. A court case will decide whether they can
Abortion rights have been protected in Michigan at the state level since April, when a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood, anticipating the fall of Roe, stalled enforcement of a 1931 state law that banned the practice. The three locations of Northland Family Planning Center, Chelian’s operation, hummed along under that decision, assuring visitors to its homepage that “abortion is still legal in Michigan under a court order.” But on August 1, a Michigan court ruled that injunction did not apply to county prosecutors. And one of Northland’s locations sat in a brick building on the western edge of Macomb County, where the Republican prosecutor, Peter Lucido, had for months been promising to charge providers with the felonies that law carried. “All laws of the state that have not been repealed will be enforced by the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office,” he wrote on Facebook the evening Roe fell.
By noon that day, Chelian closed Northland’s Macomb County location and rescheduled as many patients as possible at her other clinics outside the county. “We’ll go wherever we’re needed to go,” the doctors promised — but not before they’d spoken with Chelian’s lawyers, to be reasonably sure they still wouldn’t be prosecuted for offering services elsewhere. The doctors returned to a roomful of patients, anxiously waiting, to explain what was happening. Some of those being turned away didn’t understand — abortion was still legal in Michigan, wasn’t it?
For the time being, anyway. In addition to the lawsuit that stalled the 1931 ban, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has sued the local prosecutors in counties where abortion clinics operate to stop them from enforcing it, too. But in Macomb and at least two other counties in Michigan, prosecutors have said they’d enforce the 1931 law that laid dormant while Roe was the law of the land. Attorney General Dana Nessel scrambled to get a judge to issue a pause on the ruling, the official fate of which falls to a trial that begins Wednesday.
Chelian reopened her Macomb location once the pause was issued and has seen patients as usual since, but “we don’t know what will happen in court this week,” she says. She doesn’t know because the rollback of nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights has left a patchwork of protections in it place, subject to the whims of shifting legal rulings and emboldened local officials. In this tenuous arrangement, legal access to abortions could depend not only on the state, but the county, paralyzing providers and patients in the process.
Lucido has held uncompromising anti-abortion stances since his tenure in the Michigan state legislature. His 2014 campaign platform vowed to ban abortion with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. Lucido has often declined to offer his personal views on abortion, but in response to such questions has noted he’s a lifelong Catholic. (His Facebook announcement on the day of the Dobbs decision alerted that “ANY ATTACKS on churches or crisis pregnancy centers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” — without extending the same courtesy to abortion clinics.)
Lucido first revealed how he’d approach a post-Roe Michigan after Whitmer filed her lawsuit in early April. “We are not able to pick and choose laws that are on the books,” he told reporters as he promised to prosecute any criminal complaints against abortion clinics. He doubled down during a press conference the following month. “If it’s on the books, I took an oath of office to uphold the law,” he said.
He began preparing his office for that undertaking once a draft of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Center decision leaked in early May. Lucido asked the Macomb County Board of Commissioners for funding to defend himself against Whitmer’s lawsuit that targets county prosecutors. Should he prevail against her, he could move forward with prosecutions of abortion providers. He received $10,000 to cover legal fees and received it (though the board denied his request this week for an additional $47,000 in defense funds).
Lucido’s justification for prosecuting abortion clinics cites the familiar Republican adherence to “law and order,” a rationale shared by prosecutors in Kent and Jackson Counties, who brought the lawsuit that determined prosecutors were not subject to the injunction against the 1931 ban. Indeed, even Republicans uncomfortable with the idea of punishing providers under the nearly century-old law get squeamish at the prospect of not enforcing laws. “The 1931 law is too extreme,” says Michelle Smith, a Macomb County GOP candidate for state house. “I think we should just enforce a better law,” she says. Matt DePerno, the Republican nominee for attorney general, has said he would enforce the pre-Roe ban if he wins in November. “I would expect county prosecutors to enforce the law,” he says. “They take an oath.”
“That’s pure rubbish,” Karen McDonald, a Democratic prosecutor in Oakland County, says of DePerno’s argument, noting the preponderance of obsolete laws that remain on the books. “If that’s true, I’d have to prosecute infidelity.”
Legal experts believe that Michigan abortion providers should feel relatively secure in their rights, at least leading to November elections, when voters will cast ballots to preserve abortion as a right in the state constitution. “I could see judges wanting to stand down and preserve the status quo until the voters decide,” says Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan. Even if the court rules that prosecutors can enforce the pre-Roe ban, state or local law enforcement would have to present prosecutors with evidence of a crime which, so far, they’ve declined to do.
But the confusion surrounding what’s legal and not is the point, Michigan abortion providers say. The legal limbo, down to the county level, paralyzes providers as an ever-growing number of abortion seekers flooding into Michigan from surrounding states that have outlawed the practice. “It’s a feature, not a bug, and it has a chilling effect,” says Laura Owens, a gynecologist and obstetrician working in Michigan. And with the uncertainty of court rulings comes the “roller coaster” ever-shifting responsibilities and capacity, even for providers who live in counties with Democratic prosecutors, explains an abortion provider in Wayne County, who goes by Sam to protect her identity. “If there’s a question about whether Renee’s going to be open, can we handle the influx of her patients?” she says.
It’s remarkable that Chelian would speak with me at all; other clinics in Macomb declined my requests for interviews, citing safety concerns and the possibility of incriminating themselves if the courts don’t take their side. As the judge takes up the case on Wednesday, Chelian expects to be tethered to her phone as she awaits the official ruling. “If we don’t win, we will not be seeing patients in a county where our doctors would risk prosecution,” Chelian explains. “I believe others will follow suit.”
VOTING MATTERS!
KANSAS held an abortion referendum during a primary when voter turnout is customarily low and within the privacy of the voting booth, abortion supporters spoke. They didn't need to attend rallies or make their views public, facing retribution. VOTERS SPOKE - including REPUBLICANS!
And now a HAND RECOUNT?
Tighter election laws is Republican code for VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT.
Kansas abortion vote: Why recount with such a large margin?
Kansas has begun a partial hand recount of this month’s decisive statewide vote in favor of abortion rights
Nine of the state’s 105 counties are doing the recount at the request of Melissa Leavitt, of Colby, in far northwestern Kansas, who has pushed for tighter election laws. A longtime anti-abortion activist, Mark Gietzen, of Wichita, is covering most of the costs.
A larger than expected turnout of voters on Aug. 2 rejected a ballot measure that would have removed protections for abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution and given to the Legislature the right to further restrict abortion or ban it. It failed by 18 percentage points, or 165,000 votes statewide.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/kansas-abortion-vote-recount-large-margin-88465732
Kansas abortion vote shows limits of GOP’s strength
An increase in turnout among Democrats and independents and a notable shift in Republican-leaning counties contributed to the overwhelming support of abortion rights last week in traditionally conservative Kansas, according to a detailed Associated Press analysis of the voting results.
A proposed state constitutional amendment would have allowed the Republican-controlled Legislature to tighten restrictions or ban abortions outright. But Kansas voters rejected the measure by nearly 20 percentage points, almost a mirror of Republican Donald Trump's statewide margin over Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
https://www.cpr.org/2022/08/14/kansas-abortion-vote-shows-limits-of-gops-strength/
FLORIDA LUNACY -
Florida court blocks teen from getting abortion, must continue pregnancy
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/16/florida-teenager-abortion-court-blocked
Louisiana mother denied abortion, will be forced to give birth to headless baby or travel out of state thanks to anti-abortion law
In a shocking story that would be disparaged as too heavy handed if it were literary fiction, acrania — a deformity in which the baby's skull does not properly form — is not on the list of conditions deemed acceptably "medically futile" by the Louisiana Department of Health. Would-be mother Nancy Davis was denied an abortion despite the certainty that the baby would not survive birth.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ax38w/louisiana-woman-headless-fetus-abortion-ban
People arrive for work at the Amazon distribution center in the Staten Island borough of New York, Oct. 25, 2021. (photo: Craig Ruttle/AP)
A spokesperson for the National Labor Relations Board said the petition was filed for the warehouse known as ALB1, located in the town of Schodack, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Albany.
To qualify for a union election, the NLRB requires signatures from 30% of eligible voters at a specific facility. Whether or not workers have reached that threshold will likely be hashed out in the coming weeks.
Paul Flaningan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company has roughly 1,000 warehouse workers at the Schodack location. But in the filing, the Amazon Labor Union, the nascent union backing the workers, said there would be roughly 400 employees in the bargaining unit.
Heather Goodall, a warehouse worker and a former insurance agent who’s leading the organizing effort, said in an interview earlier this month that workers had enough support to file for a union petition, but were choosing to delay in order to pick up even more signatures. On Tuesday, she said the group’s attorneys were not ready to release information on the number of signatures collected to the public.
The NLRB must now verify if the workers who signed the petition are qualified to seek an election. If the agency approves, it will sort out dates and times for an election between the company and the Amazon Labor Union, which pulled off a union win on Staten Island, New York in April.
The union, composed of former and current warehouse workers, began backing organizing efforts in upstate New York after it was approached by Goodall, who joined Amazon in February to scope out the company’s working conditions. She quickly began talking to her co-workers about organizing and launched the union campaign in May along with a group of other workers.
Soon after, Goodall said she met with the Teamsters and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, which also took on Amazon during a union election at a facility in Bessemer, Alabama, the results of which are still being contested.
Eventually, she said organizers decided to pursue a more grassroots approach and align with the ALU, based on a belief the group understood the company better than other established unions.
“It seemed to make sense that we work directly with them, and continue to build the Amazon Labor Union nationally,” Goodall said.
A labor victory in Schodack would essentially broaden ALU’s support within Amazon and transform it into a touch point for labor concerns beyond Staten Island. It could also revive enthusiasm that began to flail following the group’s May loss at a second warehouse on Staten Island and reports that it halted organizing at two other nearby facilities.
At the same time, the ALU is defending its lone win against Amazon, which has filed more than two dozen objections to that election. Attorneys for both sides have attempted to discredit the others’ claims during a weeks-long, contentious NLRB hearing that wrapped up in mid-July. A ruling on that case is expected to be issued in the coming weeks.
Organizers say Amazon has already began holding meetings with workers in Schodack to discourage them from unionizing. In a statement, Flaningan, the Amazon spokesperson, said employees can choose what they want to do.
“As a company, we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees,” Flaningan said. “Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work.”
Meanwhile, dozens of TikTok creators are pledging to stop business with Amazon until it meets the demands of the union, such as a minimum wage of $30 an hour and longer breaks. On Tuesday, the nonprofit Gen-Z for Change unveiled a campaign backed by roughly 70 content creators who say they will refuse to monetize their platforms for Amazon unless “tangible changes” are made to improve working condition.
“Amazon’s widespread mistreatment of their workers and blatant use of union busting tactics will no longer be tolerated by the TikTok Community or TikTok Creators,” said the letter the group shared on Twitter.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the campaign.
Other campaigns have been underway at company warehouses in states like Kentucky and North Carolina as workers attempt to gather enough signatures to petition for their own elections. Among other things, workers in upstate New York are calling for better training at the company’s warehouse and higher wages.
“We have employees that are unable to even make it to work because they can’t afford gas,” Goodall said. “They can’t afford car repairs, they can’t afford to support their families.”
The petition comes amid broader scrutiny into Amazon and its warehouse operations across the country. On Monday, dozens of workers at a company air hub in San Bernardino, California walked off the job to protest low wages and safety from heat.
Federal officials have also been more involved. Last month, OSHA inspected Amazon facilities in a handful of states after receiving referrals for health and safety violations. The civil division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is also investigating safety hazards at Amazon warehouses and what a spokesperson for the office called “fraudulent conduct designed to hide injuries from OSHA and others.”
Salma al-Shehab with her husband and two sons. (photo: Twitter)
Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University student, was charged with following and retweeting dissidents and activists
The sentencing by Saudi’s special terrorist court was handed down weeks after the US president Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, which human rights activists had warned could embolden the kingdom to escalate its crackdown on dissidents and other pro-democracy activists.
The case also marks the latest example of how the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has targeted Twitter users in his campaign of repression, while simultaneously controlling a major indirect stake in the US social media company through Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF).
Salma al-Shehab, 34, a mother of two young children, was initially sentenced to serve three years in prison for the “crime” of using an internet website to “cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security”. But an appeals court on Monday handed down the new sentence – 34 years in prison followed by a 34-year travel ban – after a public prosecutor asked the court to consider other alleged crimes.
According to a translation of the court records, which were seen by the Guardian, the new charges include the allegation that Shehab was “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by re-tweeting their tweets. It is believed that Shehab may still be able to seek a new appeal in the case.
By all accounts, Shehab was not a leading or especially vocal Saudi activist, either inside the kingdom or in the UK. She described herself on Instagram – where she had 159 followers – as a dental hygienist, medical educator, PhD student at Leeds University and lecturer at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, and as a wife and a mother to her sons, Noah and Adam.
Her Twitter profile showed she had 2,597 followers. Among tweets about Covid burnout and pictures of her young children, Shehab sometimes retweeted tweets by Saudi dissidents living in exile, which called for the release of political prisoners in the kingdom. She seemed to support the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi feminist activist who was previously imprisoned, is alleged to have been tortured for supporting driving rights for women, and is now living under a travel ban.
One person who knew Shehab said she could not stomach injustice. She was described as well-educated and an avid reader who had arrived in the UK in 2018 or 2019 to pursue her PhD at Leeds. She had returned home to Saudi Arabia in December 2020 on a holiday and had intended to bring her two children and husband back to the UK with her. She was then called in for questioning by Saudi authorities and eventually arrested and tried for her tweets.
A person who followed her case said Shehab had at times been held in solitary confinement and had sought during her trial to privately tell the judge something about how she had been handled, which she did not want to state in front of her father. She was not permitted to communicate the message to the judge, the person said. The appeals verdict was signed by three judges but the signatures were illegible.
Twitter declined to comment on the case and did not respond to specific questions about what – if any – influence Saudi Arabia has over the company. Twitter previously did not respond to questions by the Guardian about why a senior aide to Prince Mohammed, Bader al-Asaker, has been allowed to keep a verified Twitter account with more than 2 million followers, despite US government allegations that he orchestrated an illegal infiltration of the company which led anonymous Twitter users to be identified and jailed by the Saudi government. One former Twitter employee has been convicted by a US court in connection to the case.
One of Twitter’s biggest investors is the Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns more than 5% of Twitter through his investment company, Kingdom Holdings. While Prince Alwaleed still serves as chairman of the company, his control over the group faced questions in the US media, including the Wall Street Journal, after it emerged that the Saudi royal – a cousin of the crown prince – had been held captive at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh for 83 days. The incident was part of a broader purge led by Prince Mohammed against other members of the royal family and businessmen, and involved allegations of torture, coercion and expropriation of billions in assets into Saudi coffers.
In a 2018 Bloomberg interview of Prince Alwaleed, which was conducted in Riyadh seven weeks after his release, the billionaire acknowledged he had reached a “confirmed understanding” with the Saudi government, apparently in connection to his release, which was confidential.
More recently, Kingdom Holding announced in May that it had sold about 17% of its company to the PIF, where Prince Mohammed serves as chairman, for $1.5bn. That, in turn, makes the Saudi government a significant indirect investor in Twitter. According to Twitter, investors do not play a role in managing the company’s day-to-day business.
The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights condemned Shehab’s sentence, which it said was the longest prison sentence to ever be brought against any activist. It noted that many female activists have been subjected to unfair trials that have led to arbitrary sentences and have been subjected to “severe torture”, including sexual harassment.
Khalid Aljabri, a Saudi who is living in exile and whose sister and brother are being held in the kingdom, said the Shehab case proved Saudi Arabia’s view that dissent equates to terrorism.
“Salma’s draconian sentencing in a terrorism court over peaceful tweets is the latest manifestation of MBS’s ruthless repression machine,” he said, referring to the crown prince. “Just like [journalist Jamal] Khashoggi’s assassination, her sentencing is intended to send shock waves inside and outside the kingdom – dare to criticise MBS and you will end up dismembered or in Saudi dungeons.”
While the case has not received widespread attention, the Washington Post on Tuesday published a scathing editorial about Saudi Arabia’s treatment of the Leeds student and said her case showed that “commitments” the president had received on reforms were “a farce”.
“At the very least, Mr. Biden must now speak out forcefully and demand that Ms. Shehab be released and allowed to return to her sons, 4 and 6 years old, in the United Kingdom, and to resume her studies there,” it read.
Deep ocean life. (photo: Giordano Cipriani/Getty Images)
The movement of continents over millions of years plays a surprising role in the survival of marine life, a new study reports.
Now, scientists led by Alexandre Pohl, a paleoclimate researcher at the Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, have revealed the “unrecognized role” of continents in circulating oxygen through the oceans, with life-or-death consequences for marine life, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.
The team ran a model of ocean currents spanning 540 million years, the largest timeframe ever for a study of this kind, to shed light on the impact of continental configurations in ocean oxygen circulation. The results revealed that the position of continents can cut off the oxygen supply to the deep sea, sparking mass die-offs in these habitats, which the study called “a radically different conclusion” from traditional interpretations of geological evidence.
“The last ~540 million years represent the period over which complex forms of life (i.e. life as we know it today) appeared,” said Pohl in an email. “And we know that oxygen is a linchpin for complex marine organisms (such as fish; we need to breathe, they do too). Therefore, it is important to determine how ocean oxygen evolved to understand the co-evolution of life and the environment.”
“Studies had been conducted on specific time slices,” he added, citing the Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 that starved the oceans of oxygen 95 million years ago, killing off many large Cretaceous creatures. This research “suggested a key role of the continental configuration in shaping ocean circulation, thus ocean oxygenation. We decided to extend that work to the whole Phanerozoic (last ~540 million years) to really quantify the impact of continental changes on ocean oxygenation over the period that witnessed the evolution of complex forms of marine life.”
The researchers simulated the position of the continents at 28 points in time, each one 20 million years apart, with a focus on how shifting plate tectonics affect ocean currents. While the team predicted the continents would play a role in ocean currents, and therefore oxygen circulation, they were surprised that the model presented a severe decoupling of oxygen exchange between the upper and lower portions of the ocean during the early Paleozoic period, some 540 and 460 million years ago.
“It was not unexpected that the continental configuration would impact ocean currents, thus oxygenation,” Pohl said. “The amplitude of the changes, however, was unexpected. They are big.”
Complex life first took hold in the oceans during that particular stretch of time, but geologists have also found evidence that the ocean was poorly oxygenated, or “anoxic,” presenting challenges to many species.
“So far, it was assumed that this poor oxygenation was the result of a reduced oxygen concentration in the atmosphere,” Pohl explained. “Here we show that’s not necessarily the case: the continental configuration and associated ocean circulation make the ocean intrinsically prone to deoxygenation at that time in our model. Indeed, the deep ocean is largely anoxic in our model in the early Paleozoic even when the atmospheric oxygen concentration is maintained to its present-day level.”
“The usual rationale is that a poorly oxygenated ocean in the deep geological time implies a poorly oxygenated atmosphere,” he added. “Our results show that it’s not so simple. The ocean circulation sometimes induces a decoupling between upper-ocean and deep-ocean oxygen concentrations.”
The study is strictly focused on the deep past, so there’s no need to worry that the current position of continents on Earth will suddenly trigger a mass die-off. Pohl noted that the timescales of plate tectonics cover tens of millions of years, which is too slow to be an immediate concern on human lifespans.
The movement of continents isn’t the only thing that could kick off a similar mass die-off of marine life, however. The study is part of a growing body of research that aims to reconstruct all the complex factors at play in Earth’s biosphere, including the effects of human-driven climate change, which is depleting oxygen in some parts of the oceans on rapid timescales.
“We’d need a higher resolution climate model to predict a mass extinction event,” said Andy Ridgwell, a geologist at the University of California Riverside who co-authored the study, in a statement. “That said, we do already have concerns about water circulation in the North Atlantic today, and there is evidence that the flow of water to depth is declining.”
To that end, Pohl and his colleagues plan to delve deeper into the role played by continental changes, among others, in ocean oxygenation and marine biodiversity.
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