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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
Choking back tears as he delivered his commentary, the Fox News host said that the jury’s decision “was no more and no less than a direct attack on the lying life style.”
“For those of us who make our living by spreading falsehoods, baseless conspiracy theories, and extremist fever dreams, this is a time to be afraid,” he said. “Very afraid.”
“I think I speak for many Fox viewers when I say I don’t want to live under a tyranny of facts,” he added.
Carlson’s concerns about the impact of the jury’s decision on the mendacity profession found support on Capitol Hill from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“I want to say that the jury was manipulated by mind-control rays beamed down from the Rothschild family’s satellites, but now I can’t afford to,” she said.
President Joe Biden is introduced by Zachary Bernard, a senior at Delaware State University, before speaking about student debt relief on October 21 in Dover, Delaware. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)
The program is almost certainly legal, but that fact is unlikely to persuade a judiciary dominated by his partisan foes.
On Friday, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit temporarily prohibited the Biden administration from “discharging any student loan debt” under a recently announced program that will provide some borrowers with as much as $20,000 in debt relief. This case is known as Nebraska v. Biden.
Again, the order is temporary — it appears designed to pause the program while the court figures out whether or not to strike it down — but it is an extraordinarily ominous sign for Americans hoping to benefit from the program.
Although there are few good arguments that the debt relief program is illegal, a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees could still strike the program down under a judicially created legal doctrine known as “major questions.”
Biden announced the loan cancellation program in August. Under its terms, many borrowers who earned less than $125,000 during the pandemic should receive up to $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. Borrowers who received Pell Grants, federal grants that target low-income college students, may receive as much as $20,000 in debt forgiveness.
The program is almost certainly permissible under a post-9/11 law known as the Heroes Act, which gives the Secretary of Education broad authority to “waive or modify” many student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” The relevant “national emergency” is the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economic disruption that emerged from the pandemic.
In the previous administration, President Donald Trump ordered then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to temporarily suspend payments “on student loans held by the Department of Education,” in order to alleviate some of the financial strain on student loan borrowers caused by the pandemic. Federal law permits the secretary to suspend payments for up to three years for borrowers experiencing “economic hardship.”
Now that the most severe phase of the pandemic appears to be over, the Biden administration plans to resume student loan payments in January 2023, It coupled that resumption of payments with permanent student loan forgiveness for many borrowers.
Almost immediately after Biden announced the forgiveness program, however, Republicans and other ideological conservatives began scheming for ways to block this program in court. The Nebraska lawsuit currently pending in the Eighth Circuit was brought by five Republican state attorneys general and one Republican state governor.
One of the biggest legal obstacles facing these Republican litigants is “standing,” the requirement that anyone who challenges a government policy in federal court must be able to show they were injured in some way by that policy. It is unclear whether anyone is injured by a policy that reduces some people’s debt loads and that does nothing to most Americans.
Nevertheless, opponents of Biden’s loan forgiveness program have a very good chance of prevailing eventually, as the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority has spent the last several years seeking to maximize its own authority to invalidate executive branch actions it might disagree with.
The Heroes Act gives the Education Department sweeping discretion to modify student loan obligations when an emergency arises
The Heroes Act was enacted in 2003, not long after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and as America was ramping up its decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The law promises financial assistance to members of the military who “put their lives on hold, leave their families, jobs, and postsecondary education in order to serve their country.”
Yet, while the immediate purpose of the Heroes Act was to provide student loan relief and other assistance to service members, the law also gave the secretary of education broad authority to provide relief to student loan borrowers impacted by future military operations or disasters. Congress apparently believed that, rather than requiring a new act of Congress every single time a large group of Americans should receive student loan relief, it was better to permanently empower a political official to grant such relief when they deemed it appropriate.
The law enables the secretary to “waive or modify” federal student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” It defines a “national emergency” to include anything that the president declares to be such an emergency (such as the Covid-19 pandemic), and it states explicitly that the secretary “is not required to exercise the waiver or modification authority under this section on a case-by-case basis” for each individual student borrower.
Congress, in other words, made several very explicit choices. First, it determined that the president alone shall have the unilateral authority to determine when a national emergency exists that is sufficiently grave to activate the secretary’s loan cancellation authority. Second, once that authority is activated, the law states that loans may be waived or modified “as the Secretary deems necessary.” Congress chose to vest discretion over who should receive student loan relief in a very specific individual within the executive branch — and it rather pointedly did not give this authority to the judiciary.
Finally, Congress was quite clear that the secretary’s authority extends beyond the most acute phase of a national emergency. The law states that the secretary may act “in connection with” an emergency, rather than using narrower language that might constrain the secretary’s authority more, like if Congress had placed temporal or similar restrictions on when the secretary may act. And it states that one purpose of the secretary’s loan cancellation authority is to ensure that student borrowers impacted by a national emergency “are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of their status as affected individuals.”
All of which is a long way of saying that the Biden administration stood on very firm legal ground when it announced its new student loan cancellation program.
Congress, moreover, must have known that, in giving this broad discretion to a presidential appointee, this appointee might wield that authority in ways that the opposing party disagrees with — or that the president’s opponents view as excessively political. And yet Congress chose to accept this risk, believing that it was better to ensure that people who deserve loan relief receive that relief.
The courts are unlikely to care what the Heroes Act actually says
The Heroes Act was not controversial when it became law — it passed the Senate by unanimous consent, passed the House by a 421 – 1 vote, and was signed by President George W. Bush, a Republican. Nevertheless, there is a very serious risk that the courts, which are dominated by Republican appointees, will override Congress’s near-unanimous judgment and invalidate Biden’s student loan relief program.
The reason why is something known as the “major questions doctrine,” an ill-defined legal doctrine mentioned nowhere in either the Constitution or in any federal statute, and that appears to have been entirely fabricated by members of the judiciary.
Under this doctrine, the Supreme Court explained in a 2014 opinion, courts may invalidate a federal agency’s actions if they determine that this action touches upon a matter of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
Technically, the major questions doctrine permits Congress to empower agencies to decide questions of great significance if Congress uses sufficiently precise language. But the Court has never said just how precise that language must be. And the whole point of statutes like the Heroes Act is to give agencies discretion to act when unexpected events occur. A requirement that Congress must define an agency’s powers with extraordinary precision defeats that purpose.
The Supreme Court also has not explained what constitutes a matter of “vast economic and political significance.” And the Court’s decisions suggest that the answer to this question is largely arbitrary — and hinges more on whether five justices wish to veto an agency’s actions than on whether that agency has actually done something of particular importance.
Take, for example, the Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022). That case involved the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a 2015 policy that set emissions reduction targets that the energy industry was supposed to hit by 2030.
But the Clean Power Plan proved to be a total dud. For one thing, it never took effect — the Supreme Court voted along party lines to suspend it in 2016. More importantly, it appears that nothing significant would have changed if the Clean Power Plan had gone into effect.
That’s because many energy producers decided to shift away from coal-fired plants with high levels of emissions to cleaner technologies, not because the government required them to do so but because coal-fired plants are more expensive to operate than cleaner plants. Thanks in large part to good ol’ free market capitalism, the energy industry wound up meeting the Clean Power Plan’s 2030 targets 11 years early, in 2019.
And yet, in West Virginia, the Supreme Court deemed this nothingburger regulation to involve matters of such vast economic or political significance that it must be struck down.
So the major questions doctrine has no clear substance and does not operate in any predictable way. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her West Virginia dissent, the doctrine functions as a “get-out-of-text-free” card, which permits her Court to act as it pleases when the text of a federal law might undermine a majority of the justices’ “broader goals.”
Thus, if a majority of the Supreme Court wants to invalidate Biden’s loan relief program, they already claimed the power to do so for purely arbitrary reasons in cases like West Virginia. And six of the Supreme Court’s nine seats are held by Republicans, all of whom have already wielded this substance-free doctrine to invalidate Biden administration policies on subjects ranging from vaccination to evictions.
It is far from clear whether anyone is allowed to file a lawsuit challenging the loan cancellation program
One of the biggest legal obstacles facing anyone who wants to challenge the Biden administration’s loan forgiveness program in court is that it is far from clear that federal courts are allowed to hear such a lawsuit. As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), no one may file a federal lawsuit challenging a government policy unless they have suffered an “injury in fact” that is “fairly traceable” to the policy that they are challenging — a requirement known as “standing.”
But who, exactly, is injured by this federal loan policy? Most Americans aren’t impacted in any way by the loan cancellation policy, and those who do qualify for loan forgiveness should be better off than they would be in the absence of the policy — because they will have less debt.
Nevertheless, the various plaintiffs challenging the loan cancellation program have each offered fairly baroque arguments that they are somehow worse off because of this program.
In the Nebraska case, for example, several of the plaintiff states argue that they are worse off because the loan forgiveness program encourages student borrowers who received loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) — a program that stopped issuing new loans in 2010 — to convert those loans into something known as a “direct” loan. FFELP borrowers may convert those loans into direct loans at no cost, but under the Biden administration’s loan forgiveness program, FFELP borrowers must convert their loans to direct loans by September 29, 2022, in order to qualify for forgiveness.
The plaintiff states essentially argue that they have invested in FFELP loans and that they will not receive as much money from these investments if borrowers convert their FFELP loans into direct loans. Thus, they claim, they are financially worse off because of the loan forgiveness program and have standing to challenge it in federal court.
The problem with this argument, as Judge Henry Edward Autrey explained in an opinion dismissing the Nebraska case, is that the September 29 deadline for FFELP borrowers to convert their loans into direct loans has already passed. Thus, the loan cancellation program creates no “ongoing incentive” for FFELP borrowers to convert their loans into direct loans, and the states will not be injured by the loan cancellation program even if they are heavily invested in FFELP loans.
Meanwhile, in a different lawsuit, an attorney at a conservative litigation shop claimed that he will be worse off if his loans are canceled under the Biden administration’s program because the unusual tax regime in his home state of Indiana would require him to pay higher state taxes if his loans are forgiven under the new program. But the Biden administration clarified shortly after this lawsuit was filed that people eligible for loan forgiveness may opt out, thus rescuing this plaintiff from paying higher state taxes — and eliminating any injury he may have experienced as a result of the loan forgiveness program.
It is possible, in other words, that all of the lawsuits challenging the student loan relief program could fail because no plaintiff can show that they were injured in any legally significant way by the program.
That said, while the standing requirement prevents federal courts from hearing cases where no one was injured, a plaintiff only has to show the smallest injury to overcome that requirement — if a bank or investor can show that they will lose a single penny because of the loan forgiveness program, for example, that would be enough. So the likelihood that Republicans and other opponents of the loan forgiveness program will eventually find some plaintiff who is invested in some obscure financial instrument, whose value drops when student loans are forgiven, remains fairly high. And once they find this unusual plaintiff and convince them to sue, that will be enough.
So how long will this all take to play out?
It is likely that the Eighth Circuit will move fairly quickly in the Nebraska case — Judge Autrey’s decision holding that the state plaintiffs lack standing to sue is currently before that appeals court. In its order temporarily halting the loan forgiveness program, moreover, the Eighth Circuit called for a tight briefing schedule that concludes at 5 pm on Tuesday.
The appeals court could ultimately agree with Autrey that the plaintiffs don’t have a reason to be suing. But the conservative Eighth Circuit — 10 of the court’s 11 active judges were appointed by Republicans — could also issue an order declaring the loan forgiveness program invalid under the major questions doctrine as soon as Wednesday, or even Tuesday evening if they are in a hurry.
Should that happen, or should any other federal appeals court block the loan forgiveness program, the Biden administration will undoubtedly seek relief in the Supreme Court. The justices might rule on that request right away. But the Court might also deny immediate relief to the Biden administration and then sit on the case for months, leaving the lower court’s order blocking the program in effect for that entire months-long waiting period.
It may be a little while, in other words, before the Supreme Court hands down its final word on whether to permit the student loan forgiveness program to stand. But a lower court decision suspending the program could be handed down very soon. And, if that happens, the program may never actually take effect.
Of course, there are few good legal arguments against the loan forgiveness program. The Heroes Act is quite clear that the Education Department has broad authority to forgive student loans “in connection with” a historic crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the Court’s “major questions” decisions make it clear that the Supreme Court doesn’t need a good legal argument to strike down a federal agency’s action. It only needs five votes.
Trump chief of staff Meadows ordered to testify before Ga. grand jury. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg)
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) has said that her inquiry is examining “the multistate, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.” Because Meadows does not live in Georgia, she could not subpoena him to testify but filed a petition in August for him to do so.
South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Edward Miller ruled Wednesday that Meadows must comply with a subpoena as his testimony is “material and necessary to the investigation and that the state of Georgia is assuring not to cause undue hardship to him.”
The ruling was confirmed Wednesday by Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Willis. DiSantis said Meadows would not be called until after the midterm elections.
An attorney for Meadows said Wednesday there is a possibility of an appeal or additional legal action.
“There may be additional proceedings before the trial judge before any decision is made about an appeal,” said Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger.
Meadows, who served four terms as a congressman from North Carolina before becoming Trump’s White House chief of staff, has helped promote Trump’s baseless claims that widespread voter fraud delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. Meadows has said he now lives in South Carolina, though he registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a North Carolina mobile home.
In her petition seeking Meadows’s testimony, Willis noted Meadows’s participation in a telephone call Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021 to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) asking him to “find” 11,780 votes that would enable him to defeat Joe Biden in the state.
Willis wrote that she was also interested in testimony regarding a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting Meadows attended at the White House with Trump and others “to discuss allegations of voter fraud and the certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other state.”
Willis also noted in the petition that on Dec. 22, 2020, Meadows “made a surprise visit” to the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta, Ga., where the Georgia Secretary of State’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were conducting an absentee ballot signature match audit.
There, Meadows “requested to personally observe the audit process but was prevented from doing so because the audit was not open to the public,” Willis wrote.
Meadows had sought to kill the Georgia subpoena citing executive privilege and making the argument that the special Georgia grand jury is conducting a civil inquiry and is not a criminal proceeding that would require his testimony. Willis has said that the investigation — being conducted by a special grand jury — is criminal in nature.
Meadows’s South Carolina lawyer, James W. Bannister, argued in court filings that the subpoena was moot because the September date on which his testimony was originally sought has passed.
The Meadows ruling came Wednesday as another prominent Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), has appealed to the Supreme Court to block a request for his testimony.
Graham has argued that he is protected from having to testify by constitutional protections provided to lawmakers conducting official business.
Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday put a temporary hold on an order that Graham appear. The brief order appears to be an attempt to maintain the status quo as Graham’s petition to the Supreme Court advances. Prosecutors face a Thursday deadline for responding to Graham’s request, which usually means the full court will consider the issue.
Last week, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit turned down an attempt by Graham to block a subpoena from Willis in which the lawmaker claimed a sitting senator is shielded from testifying in such investigations.
Despite resistance from Graham, Meadows and others, the Georgia grand jury has heard testimony from prominent Trump advisers, including lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. Requests for testimony are pending from former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.
Many Georgia Republican officials have already testified. The list includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and his staff, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R), state lawmakers and local election workers. The state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, filed a 121-page motion in August seeking to kill a subpoena requiring his testimony. The judge overseeing the inquiry agreed to delay the governor’s appearance until after the 2022 election. Kemp is seeking reelection.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he launched the migrant relocation program as part of an effort to draw attention to the immigration policies of President Joe Biden. (photo: Crystal Vander Weit)
On September 14, two planes picked up 48 migrants in San Antonio, Texas, and dropped them off in Martha’s Vineyard. Their arrival prompted a frantic response that included humanitarian aid provided by locals and assistance from Massachusetts officials.
The next day, DeSantis’ office acknowledged it sent the planes, drawing strong reaction from Democratic officials in Florida and the White House.
On Tuesday, Leon County Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh said the governor’s office did not show “any steps, direct steps taken to gather what this court finds are public records” requested by the Florida Center for Government Accountability. The judge gave the administration 20 days to provide the records, the Miami Herald reported.
CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.
“We’re very pleased to report that we were victorious in court today …” the FLCGA tweeted. “… It’s a great day for the Public Records Act and the right to know what our government is doing!”
The group filed a lawsuit October 10 seeking to compel release of the public records including text and phone logs, communication with the contractors who provided the flights as well as copies of any waivers the migrants signed.
“We don’t believe the Governor’s Office responded in good faith to our records request. Not a single record that we actually requested has been produced,” Michael Barfield, FLCGA’s public access program director, said in a news release when the suit was filed. “The public’s right to know is more important than the Governor’s desire to dole out misinformation. The Governor has a constitutional duty to provide information to the citizens of the state of Florida.”
Powell Mejias, Michael Williams’s mother, showing an image of Michael (brown shirt) and his aunt Robin Terrell. (photo: Malik Rainey/The Guardian)
A Black man was hanged, then a group of white people burned his body by a US roadside. His family want police and prosecutors to acknowledge race was a factor, but they still deny it
Smoke from the fire surged into the clear sky. Giant gray puffs were spiraling out of the ditch, but discerning their source was impossible from afar in the late-afternoon hours.
Destiny Andersen and her brother were driving on a nearby bridge when they saw it. Destiny, just over 20 years old, walked to the ditch and thought she saw a human body amid the flames. They called their mother, who figured a cow carcass was being burned. They weren’t too concerned but their mother mentioned it in a phone call to Nancy, Destiny’s grandmother.
Nancy knew that in this part of Jasper county, in rural central Iowa, nobody owns cows any more. The partial drought of September 2020 made fires particularly dangerous.
After supper, she and her husband drove the quarter-mile to the bridge. “I took a few minutes looking at it and figured out that it was a human being and not an animal,” she recalls. She hoped it was some twisted practical joke but called 911.
A deputy sheriff arrived at the scene and handed first responders a fire extinguisher. The flames withered. In front of them were the charred remnants of a human body.
Authorities swiftly called the death a homicide. The victim was 44-year-old Michael Williams, who lived in nearby Grinnell.
Days later, law enforcement agencies announced they had arrested and charged a 31-year-old army veteran, Steven Vogel, with murder. Williams had been strangled, according to the medical examiner’s office. Authorities arrested and charged three others with helping Vogel move the body.
The case attracted national attention. Michael Williams was Black, and his body was burned and dumped in an almost-exclusively white part of Iowa. The four people arrested were white. These events occurred 15 weeks after Minneapolis police publicly murdered George Floyd, and massive civil rights protests were under way nationwide.
And yet, law enforcement immediately declared that no evidence suggested the murder had been motivated by racism.
Williams’s family and other members of central Iowa’s Black community weren’t convinced. The simple fact a white man hanged a Black man with a rope and then set him on fire in an easily visible spot – with three other white people helping cover up the murder – was telling.
Data analyzed by the Guardian reveals this to be common: victims’ loved ones clearly see racist motives, while law agencies often don’t.
The life of Michael’s father, James Byrd-Williams Sr, has been punctuated by tragedies steeped in racism. But he knows he’s not alone. “We’re Black people, we know what lynchings are,” he says. “We’re the ones getting lynched.”
People who knew Michael Williams remember his infectious laugh and his fun-loving, loyal personality. His skills in Dungeons and Dragons were legendary, and he was known to break into songs and dances to entertain his co-workers.
He was a loving father and grandfather who went to great lengths to care for his extended family. On the day he died, he had called his cousin to check in – they had talked about his back pain.
He believed in reinventing himself, and he had moved on his own from his native Syracuse to Nebraska when he was about 19 before settling in Iowa in 2008. He talked about going back to school to become a nurse.
But Williams also had his troubles. His diabetes had made working in fast food too painful, so he wasn’t working. He was among the handful of Black people in Grinnell, a town of 9,500 that is more than 90% white. That’s where he met Steve Vogel and Crystal Cavegn, a white couple Williams became friendly with; the three of them sometimes used recreational drugs together.
Vogel lived in the basement of his mother’s home. Records show he had been convicted of numerous crimes over the years, including burglary and assault. Cavegn, 23, was a former fast-food worker with a history of mental illness, according to her Facebook pages. In the preceding few years, she had overdosed, been homeless and gotten arrested for public intoxication and assault.
Both frequently posted on Facebook about their troubled relationship, which began in 2018. They soon got engaged and moved in together, but Vogel repeatedly hinted at being betrayed by Cavegn and he described himself as separated. Nevertheless, he continued to profess his love for her. According to Vogel’s former friend Nathaniel Haines’s later court testimony, Cavegn decided to enter rehab at some point, probably in the summer of 2020. But, according to prosecutors, Vogel was concerned that Cavegn was cheating on him with Williams.
On 12 September, Vogel invited Williams to smoke marijuana at his parents’ house, a mere block from the Grinnell police department. The pair headed towards the basement, which was unfinished and had concrete walls and floors, with some carpet laid out. Near the stairs was a single window covered with a wooden door.
Vogel suddenly hit Williams in the back of a head with a baseball bat repeatedly, according to prosecutors. He then tied a rope around Williams’s neck and threw it around the basement rafters until Williams, begging for his life, stopped moving.
Not long after, Vogel called his friend Cody Johnson to help him move “Black Mike”, as he called him. (Johnson says that Vogel threatened to hurt him if he didn’t cooperate.) They moved Williams’s body from the basement floor to underneath a nearby futon bed. But Johnson says he refused to help any further and left.
Vogel then called on a friend named Nathaniel Haines to join him. They made some pizza rolls and headed to the basement, where Williams lay lifeless on the ground wrapped in plastic in a bed frame under Vogel’s air mattress. Vogel showed Williams’s body to Haines, confessed to killing him, and asked for help in disposing of the corpse. Haines was hesitant, so they ate the rest of the pizza rolls, smoked some wax and passed out. After waking up, Haines left.
Next, Vogel solicited the help of his mother, Julia Cox, and her boyfriend, Roy Garner. They loaded the body into Garner’s green Dodge truck and they drove to the ditch, which is next to a fairly busy country road, surrounded by open fields and farmland. They were seen by a passerby.
One of them poured an accelerant on Williams’s body and set him on fire.
Garner then dropped Vogel off at his sister’s, where he told her he had killed someone. Garner and Cox proceeded to dump supplies – rope, carpet, bleach bottles, rubber gloves and a receipt with Vogel’s name on it – at a rural spot, where they were again spotted by a witness.
The whole process was sloppy – as if they couldn’t imagine getting caught.
“They really took a chance in the middle of the day,” says Nancy Andersen, the grandmother who called 911. Had Vogel and his family just left Williams’s body without setting it on fire, it might never have been found.
Soon, social media was abuzz with rumors concerning Williams’s murder, who had done it, and why. Law enforcement officers interviewed 77 people. Cox and Garner soon confessed to their roles in covering up Vogel’s murder, as did Cody Johnson.
Within a single week, with determination and competence, the more than 50 law enforcement members who worked on the case had opened and closed a brutal murder case.
So it seemed, anyway.
From the outset, authorities rejected a racial motive. “They never pursued it,” says Paula Terrell, Williams’s aunt. “They just kept saying ‘it’s a love triangle.’”
At the press conference held six days after Williams’s body was discovered, law enforcement swiftly stamped out any flickering concerns about racial motives. Adam DeCamp, special agent in charge at the Iowa department of public safety, said that the investigation hadn’t been completed but hastened to declare that race was immaterial to the crime.
Dennis Reilly, Grinnell’s chief of police, spoke next. “This terrible act is not representative of, nor does it reflect upon, the welcoming community that Grinnell is,” he said.
The next day’s headline in the Des Moines Register read, “Four charged in slaying of Grinnell man remembered as gentle, loving; no racial motive seen.”
In fact, Williams’s murder was one of several incidents in central Iowa that targeted Black people in short sequence. Months before Williams was killed, two white men allegedly assaulted 22-year-old DarQuan Jones in Des Moines, breaking bones in his face and wrist as they hurled racial slurs at him. In August 2020, Stephanie Hinton said she was pulled from her car in Des Moines, attacked and robbed by multiple white men hissing racist insults.
After Williams’s death, the Des Moines Black Lives Matter chapter declared a state of emergency in Iowa. The organization suggested Black Iowans travel in parties of two or more; avoid traveling at night; and be prepared to escape, hide or defend themselves in worst-case scenarios.
“Especially in rural Iowa, ‘sundown towns’ are a real thing here,” says the activist Jaylen Cavil, using a term referring to all-white communities that are dangerous for Black people.
Janalee Boldt, Williams’s ex-wife, a white woman with whom he had three children, has no doubt about the nature of the murder. “He was hung – that’s called lynching,” she says.
She noted that the killing happened “over a woman – a white woman”, referring to the history of lynchings involving white mobs that perceived Black men as sexually transgressing.
In Grinnell, she says, her biracial children were sometimes subjected to racism in the virtually all-white town. During the vigil for Williams put on by Grinnell College, someone conspicuously drove by with a Confederate flag.
Boldt thinks that Cavegn left Vogel for several other men before she had her alleged affair with Williams, but that those relationships hadn’t inspired Vogel to murder. “They’re white, and they’re still alive.”
James Byrd-Williams, Michael’s father, was a deputy sheriff in upstate New York for 10 years. That’s one reason he rejects authorities’ claims about his son’s murder resulting from colorblind passions. “They can’t fool me because I know how they investigate stuff,” he says.
At 6ft 8in and with a professional wrestler’s build, he looked imposing when he confronted the man who killed his son and disposed of the body in Jasper county.
He asked the court to record Vogel’s good fortune that he was resisting the urge to jump over the table, leap across the room and snap his son’s killer’s neck.
“I could do it, and nothing in here could stop me,” he said. “That’s a fact.”
Byrd-Williams saw Vogel through the prism of other events in his life. That day in court, he talked about something that happened decades earlier to his relative in a Texas county also named Jasper.
“I had a cousin murdered in Jasper City right there in Texas 22 years ago by two, three white boys,” he told Vogel and the court. “Jasper and Jasper. Two Jaspers in my life. He knew them too, just like you knew my son. But he was torn apart and drug behind a truck, and he was alive when they did that to him.”
While walking home from a family gathering in June 1998, 49-year-old James Byrd Jr took a ride from three white men, one of whom he recognized. Within 30 minutes, the three white supremacists took Byrd to an isolated spot, beat him badly, covered his face with black spray paint, chained his ankles to the back of a pickup truck, and dragged him down a road, decapitating him.
Two family members. Two different states. Both killed by white people.
After the 1998 murder, Texas’s then-governor, George W Bush, opposed a hate crimes law proposed in response, saying the sentences handed to Byrd’s three killers were punishment enough. Two of them were executed, one given life in prison.
Bush’s successor signed a law that strengthened penalties for crimes motivated by bigotry, and in 2009, Congress passed a law named partly for James Byrd that gave the federal government broader abilities to prosecute hate crimes.
In 2017, Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist who was convicted of shooting to death nine Black people in a South Carolina church, became the first person to face the death penalty under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The first legislation targeting hate crimes in the US was arguably the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1871 after the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations terrorized Black Americans following the civil war.
Under President Ulysses S Grant the law was used to prosecute and fine Klansmen, but the act’s use declined as Reconstruction was deconstructed. It was an early lesson: legislation is only as good as its enforcement. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there were more than 4,400 lynchings between Reconstruction and 1950. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 allowed for the prosecution of anyone injuring or intimidating another person based on the victim’s race, color, religion or national origin.
“The classic Tuskegee definition of lynching agreed by anti-lynching activists in 1940 is that a lynching involves an illegal killing by three or more persons in service to ‘justice, race, or tradition’,” says the John Jay College of Criminal Justice historian Michael Pfeifer, the author of several books on the subject. “What is called a hate crime today – language that dates to the 1980s and 90s – was sometimes in earlier eras called a lynching.”
Federal laws subsequently added sexual orientation and gender identity to this list of protected classes, and strengthened penalties for violations. In addition, 46 states and the District of Colombia have their own hate crime laws.
A hate crime can be perpetrated by just one or two people, while lynching was usually understood as a more collective act. But while some lynchings involved hundreds of people, some were done by small mobs.
By these definitions, lynching is alive and well in the US. In March, a white man and a white woman allegedly shot and killed a Black man at a California gas station and have been charged with a hate crime. In February 2020, three white men were captured on video chasing down Ahmaud Arbery in trucks and shooting him to death; all three were found guilty of hate crimes and murder. In Mississippi alone, there have been at least eight lynchings of Black people since 2000, according to one analysis by Julian, a civil rights organization.
Joe Biden recently signed into law an anti-lynching bill, named after Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy kidnapped and murdered in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at or flirting with a white woman.
Iowa’s laws don’t list murder as a hate crime, however. Some activists believe that Till’s murderers would be guilty of a hate crime for assaulting him and violating his civil rights but the murder itself would not count as one. For this reason, there need to be more and better laws on the books.
James Byrd-Williams was cautiously optimistic when Steven Vogel’s trial commenced in November 2021. He knew the evidence was overwhelming.
The county attorney, Bart Klaver, outlined a simple case: Vogel was dating Cavegn and “began getting concerned that Michael Williams was interfering with that relationship, and it bothered him”, he said. This approach focused on the crime itself and sidestepped any discussions of racism that might have made an all-white jury uncomfortable.
Klaver called Steven’s sister to the stand, as well as Cody Johnson, the friend who moved Williams’s body across the room of Vogel’s basement, and Nathan Haines, the friend who Vogel also asked for help. All three said that Vogel had confessed to them.
Vogel’s lawyers argued that Vogel killed Williams spontaneously, perhaps in self-defense, rather than with foresight. They didn’t call a single witness, and he never took the stand.
After less than four hours, the jury found Vogel guilty on all counts. The judge sentenced him to a life sentence without chance of parole.
After pleading guilty for their parts in the crimes, his mother, Julia Cox, was sentenced to seven years in prison, and her partner, Roy Garner, to nine. Cody Johnson pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and was sentenced to two years in prison after a judge rejected an earlier plea deal that had allowed him to avoid jail time.
For the Williams family, a sense of unfairness prevails. They say authorities neglected them during parts of the investigation, some court proceedings and Cody’s plea deals.
Paula Tyrell, Michael’s aunt, is particularly troubled that the eyewitness who spotted Garner’s truck testified in court that she saw a second silver truck carrying a fourth person, but only three people were charged with disposing of the body at the spot. The identity of the silver truck’s owner is a mystery. (Capt Dan Johnson of the Grinnell police department referred questions concerning the case to prosecutors, who didn’t respond to the Guardian’s requests for comments.)
Tyrell is also disturbed that authorities didn’t initially inform her family that Capt Johnson is Cody Johnson’s cousin. “He is the lead detective and he did not recuse himself from a case involving a family member,” she said in an email. Capt Johnson told the Guardian that he wasn’t involved in investigating Cody, but he testified in court that he was “co-lead investigator” in the Williams case.
More broadly, Williams’s family, and other members of Iowa’s Black community, argue that partial justice is no justice at all.
When officials decline to file hate crimes charges in appropriate cases, they mislead and endanger communities, says Luana Nelson-Brown, executive director of the Iowa Coalition for Collective Change. “If we don’t talk about the racial implications in a crime, we don’t give the community a chance to employ their own safety mechanisms,” she says.
Immediately after Vogel’s conviction, Scott Brown, assistant Iowa attorney general, told reporters the evidence suggested that Williams was killed over Cavegn (he didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment).
Special Agent DeCamp told the Guardian, “that’s still my belief based on the information as I know it.”
But Byrd-Williams argues that the particular disrespect that Vogel showed to Williams, by hanging him with a rope and burning him in a noticeable area, illustrated a race-based hatred. He is pushing for Iowa to stiffen its hate crime penalties – and he wants the legislation named after his son. He also wants the federal government to bring hate crime charges.
“I want his name to always be remembered in Grinnell, that he was murdered and his body was destroyed and burned in a ditch,” he says.
For Byrd-Williams, Michael’s murder compounds the pain of his cousin James Byrd’s killing.
And then there was Terry Maddox. He was another of Byrd-Williams’s sons, and Michael’s half-brother.
“He was shot in the back by a Syracuse police officer,” Byrd-Williams says.
In 2016, Maddox was attending a party in central New York when someone complained to authorities about the noise. Police and the district attorney said Maddox, 41, was firing a gun when Kelsey Francemone, a 22-year-old rookie white police officer, arrived at the party and ordered him to put it down. Maddox instead turned toward Francemone and kept firing, she later said. She returned fire and killed him.
Officials said the shooting was justified and Maddox had gun residue on his hands. No gun was ever found, however. A grand jury declined to press charges against Francemone, whose actions were lauded by state and county authorities. Seven individuals pleaded guilty to rioting, but six others charged with similar crimes decided to go to trial. All were acquitted.
The next year, Kathy Hochul, now the New York governor, honored Francemone as the state’s officer of the year.
Byrd-Williams feels differently. “My son was murdered,” he says.
Maddox left behind five children and a pregnant fiancee. He died 18 years after James Byrd and four years before Michael Williams.
Three family members. Three different states. All killed by white people.
If confirmed as a hate crime, Michael Williams’s murder would count as one of the nearly 2,900 anti-Black incidents reported in the US in 2020, a 49% increase over the year prior.
Virtually all experts believe this drastically understates the number of hate crimes, as the Guardian’s analysis shows.
“Is the hate crime data underreported? Absolutely,” says Michael Lieberman, a lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Although the FBI collects data on hate crimes, cities and police departments are not mandated to hand over any information about these crimes. Consequently, most local law enforcement agencies – about 80% – declined to share any information about hate crimes with the FBI in 2020, according to justice department numbers. And those that participated weren’t always thorough: many cities reported not a single hate crime, according to the SPLC.
“If you live in a big city where they haven’t reported a [hate] crime in a few years,” Lieberman says, “why would you call the police and report it? You have no expectation they’re either ready, willing or able to do anything about it.”
Even worse, of the approximately 200,000 incidents a year reported in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, US attorneys investigated fewer than 0.1%. Those rarely lead to prosecutions, which is why just 0.001% of the hate crimes Americans say they experience annually are prosecuted, according to the Guardian’s analysis of federal data.
The justice department’s own data show that it declined to prosecute an astounding 82% of hate crimes investigated between 2005 and 2019.
In May 2021, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced steps the department would take to improve its record. Prosecutors and other officials regularly cite the difficulty of convincing judges and juries that incidents are motivated by bigotry. Some experts say that proving a motive of hatred is difficult.
But prosecutors are hesitant because they are risk-averse, says former federal prosecutor Shanlon Wu. “They want slam-dunk cases,” he says. But in reality, proving hate is no harder than proving other criminal intent. Instead, refraining from bringing such cases means prosecutors fail to develop skills to persuade juries. “It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says.
Williams’s father was dismayed that prosecutors refused to charge Vogel with hate crimes.
Here is his truth: the decision to forgo hate crime charges in Michael’s case is only the latest example of the bigotry that has imposed itself on his world. It’s a form of racism he believes will never be absent from this life.
“The law is not made for Black people,” Byrd-Williams says.
American racism has disfigured Byrd-Williams’s life too forcefully for him to trust it can ever be eradicated. But he believes robust and well-enforced hate crimes laws can honor the victims of hatred. For that to happen, however, authorities must stop insisting certain actions are colorblind when traces of color are present.
Men like Byrd-Williams know that where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire – and sometimes, in that fire, lies a man killed for being Black.
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The attack comes more than a month after two other journalists identified as Tayson Latigue and Frantzsen Charles were fatally shot. (photo: Richard Pierrin/AFP)
Roberson Alphonse, who works at the daily newspaper Le Nouvelliste and radio station Magik9, is recovering in a hospital in Port-au-Prince.
Roberson Alphonse, who works at the daily newspaper Le Nouvelliste and radio station Magik9, has undergone two operations so far and is hospitalised and expected to recover, according to Frantz Duval, chief editor for both media.
The incident highlights the deteriorating security situation in a country racked by gang violence.
Haiti’s Ministry of Culture and Communication said it learned “with horror the news of the assassination attempt” that occurred in the Delmas neighbourhood.
“His rigour, his effort to be impartial, and his sense of perfection make him a model for the profession,” the ministry said in a statement.
Many colleagues echoed the sentiment, including Widlore Mérancourt of the online news site AyiboPost.
“My friend, Roberson Alphonse could be anything he wants anywhere in the world. He picked Haiti. He also could’ve (made) millions selling his platforms. He opted for integrity and independence. I love him and I wish him well,” he wrote.
Duval thanked an unidentified person he said rescued Alphonse and applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding before medical help arrived. He noted the car had more than 10 bullet holes.
Body of another journalist found
The attack on Alphonse comes just weeks after Haitian leaders requested the immediate deployment of foreign security forces as the country faces an unprecedented crisis.
Also on Tuesday, authorities found the body of another journalist who had been missing for several days.
Garry Tess used to host a political talk show in the southern city of Les Cayes, according to the government’s Office of Citizen Protection, which said it was extremely worried about the security of journalists in Haiti and urged they be protected.
No one has been arrested in either case, although journalists in Haiti have long been the target of warring gangs who have grown more powerful since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.
Meanwhile, the president of Haiti’s Senate, Joseph Lambert, demanded a judicial investigation.
The attacks come more than a month after two other journalists identified as Tayson Latigue and Frantzsen Charles were fatally shot and their bodies set on fire while reporting in a slum controlled by gangs.
In January, gang members killed two other journalists who were reporting in Laboule, a community south of Port-au-Prince.
The Miami-based Inter-American Press Association says this year has been one of the most violent for the press since record-keeping began in 1987.
Journalists also are still seeking justice in the March 2018 disappearance of freelance photographer Vladjimir Legagneur, who was last seen in Port-au-Prince’s Grand Ravine, one of its poorest and most dangerous areas.
Foreign troops
The government’s decision to seek international security assistance has triggered anger and protests, with Haitians shouting against “foreign occupation” and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who had asked international partners for “the immediate deployment of a specialised armed force, in sufficient quantity” to stop the “criminal actions” of armed gangs across the country.
One of Haiti’s most powerful gangs surrounded a main fuel terminal more than a month ago, demanding Henry’s resignation as they prevented the distribution of petroleum.
Gas stations have shut down, banks and grocery stores are operating on limited hours and potable water is becoming scarce as the country battles a cholera breakout that has killed at least 40 people, with more than 1,750 suspected cases so far.
UNICEF warned on Monday that the actual number of cholera cases is likely much higher, given under-reporting. The agency noted that it has only been able to find a third of the 318,000 litres (70,000 gallons) of fuel needed to serve more than half of 16 cholera treatment centres in Port-au-Prince.
On Tuesday, the European Union said it was extremely concerned about the deterioration of Haiti’s situation, adding that it has reached unsustainable levels.
“The EU regrets that as a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds and protests have been co-opted by gangs, escalating into violence, looting and territorial gains for armed gangs, political actors have so far failed to find a political solution to the crisis,” it said.
“The EU, therefore, urges all political actors to …engage in constructive negotiations to overcome the current political crisis and its security and humanitarian consequences.”
Storm clouds in Arizona. (photo: John Sirlin/Getty)
Calling the Willcox Basin “remote” would be an understatement: 2,000 square miles of sand and scrub, strewn with crop fields and lined with dusty single-lane roads, it’s nothing like the subdivided coastal paradise that Duckels was used to. Most residents live at least 30 minutes from the closest store or gas station. Many live several miles from their nearest neighbor. In most of the county there are no public services or utilities. The most famous housing development in local history was a land-fraud scam that marketed empty desert tracts to gullible northerners — a sham version of snowbird refuges like the one where Duckels had grown up.
The day the family moved to Kansas Settlement, they lost their water. When Duckels turned on the faucet, she heard a spitting noise, but nothing came out. It didn’t take long to find the source of the issue: The aquifer beneath her house had dropped below the bottom of her well. The pump was pulling on dry dirt. Duckels soon learned that many of her neighbors had lost water as well, and they’d found themselves forced to haul in jugs of water on their pickup trucks or else pay thousands of dollars to drill their wells deeper.
“Not only was our well dry, but pretty much everybody in this area has a well that was dry, or going dry, or had been dry and had to be re-drilled,” Duckels told Grist.
In times of crisis, people tend to look for a villain. It didn’t take long for Duckels to find one: Surrounding her property on all sides are farms owned by a massive dairy operation called Riverview. Over the previous decade, the Minnesota-based company had gobbled up more than 50,000 acres in Cochise County to build an expansive network of farms and feedlots, according to High Country News, which has covered Riverview and the local opposition it has engendered extensively. The dairy’s wells were far deeper than the one on Duckels’ property, and she assumed the firm was sucking all the water out from beneath her.
Riverview is hardly the only reason for the area’s water crisis — the desert aquifers had never been very robust, and a climate-change-fueled drought had made the area drier than ever — but Riverview and other large farms growing nuts and alfalfa are by far the area’s largest water users. Duckels started to look at the irrigated fields around her with fear and resentment.
“That Riverview man is literally going to try to starve us out of water,” Duckels told me, referring to the Riverview board member who runs the company’s operations in the area. “I hope every single property he owns is set on fire by someone. I hope that someone salts his ground so that nothing grows.”
Duckels’ neighbors all feel the same way. The mounting water crisis has created a groundswell of anger in the Willcox Basin. Libertarian-minded locals who might once have kept to themselves have banded together against the dairy and other large nearby farms, channeling their frustration over dry wells into a political battle against big agriculture. Interviews with almost two dozen residents in the area paint a picture of a once-sleepy community that has erupted into turmoil: Residents have shown up at public meetings to shout at Riverview representatives, sparred in comment wars in local Facebook groups, and flown rogue reconnaissance flights over dairy facilities.
The growing water shortage is driving freedom-loving denizens of the Willcox Basin to a radical solution: state regulation. In two weeks, basin residents will vote on whether to establish new restrictions on large groundwater wells, the first such referendum in state history. If voters approve the new rules, it would constitute a sea change in Arizona water politics. Not only would it be one of the first times a rural community has voted to restrict its own water usage, but it would also be a rare example of rural voters succeeding in limiting the power of large-scale agriculture.
The backlash may portend a broader political shift in the arid U.S. West. Farms are by far the largest water users in the region, and rural communities from California to Texas are watching these operations suck the water from beneath their homes. Places like Cochise County have relied on agriculture as an economic anchor, but the water crisis is drawing battle lines between rural populations and the large agricultural firms that sustain them.
“Back in the day, we used to get a lot more rain, and the theme with water was: If it’s not affecting you personally, nobody’s really gonna care,” said Esteban Vasquez, a lifelong Cochise County resident who has managed local water systems. “Now that people actually see it happening, the conversation has opened. It’s something that has hit close to home.”
Unlike the sprawling Phoenix suburbs 200 miles away, Cochise County remains mostly an undeveloped desert, almost as rural today as it was when the first prospectors and miners arrived to dig for copper more than a century ago. Most residents who spoke with Grist said they moved to the area because they wanted solitude and privacy, even if that meant roughing it. In a county where the population density is a quarter of the national average, they often see more rattlesnakes than people.
“People have to be a little bit courageous or at least ambitious,” said Christian Sawyer, who moved out to the area a few years ago in search of a quiet place where he could pursue various creative projects. “It’s people who want to do their own thing, build their own house, farm their own crops. It’s this kind of back-to-the-land libertarianism, with a bit of a hippie-type of mentality as well.”
Cochise County has a unique “opt-out” permitting system, which allows people who own more than four acres of land to build structures without having to submit to a county building inspection. This has enabled some unorthodox abodes: Some residents have built houses with composting toilets, walls made out of volcanic rock, and frames made out of straw bale.
If the absence of local regulations made Cochise County an attractive retreat for loners and libertarians, it also made it an ideal target for large farms. There have long been small cotton and alfalfa operations in the county, but over the past ten years a number of large conglomerates have moved in to grow nuts and alfalfa; several vineyards have opened as well. The growers needed a place where they could pump water with no restrictions whatsoever, and the Willcox Basin fit the bill.
These conglomerates could afford to dig groundwater wells that are much deeper than standard residential wells, giving them a de facto monopoly on the region’s aquifers. Producers have also snapped up land in unregulated localities elsewhere in the state — like the town of Kingman, where a Saudi-backed company grows alfalfa for export back to the Middle East, and Hyder, where a conglomerate called Integrated Ag has invested $90 million to grow Bermuda grass.
Riverview made the biggest splash in the Willcox Basin. Starting around 2014, the company built or bought out several separate dairy operations in the area to the tune of $180 million, beginning in Kansas Settlement and spreading out from there. With operations in five states and hundreds of thousands of cows, Riverview is one of the largest dairy firms in the country. In other states the company has been accused of muscling out family farmers by flooding local milk markets and then underpaying desperate farmers to buy them out and swallow up their acreage.
Much of the land Riverview bought had already been used for farming, but the firm dug dozens of new wells at depths of more than 1,000 feet and pumped millions of gallons of water to grow food for its large herd of heifers. State records show that Riverview owns more than 600 wells in Cochise County. The majority were drilled before the company arrived, but the wells that Riverview drilled in recent years are by far the deepest, with some of them reaching more than 2,000 feet into the earth — so deep that the water is hot from proximity to the earth’s crust. This year alone, the company has bought or drilled at least a dozen thousand-plus-foot wells.
Unlike other aquifers that are fed by rivers and streams, the aquifers in the Willcox Basin depend on rainfall alone for replenishment, so they have always been vulnerable to depletion during drought. But it wasn’t until large operations like Riverview moved in that residents started to notice their water disappearing. Groundwater accretes underground in basins, so if one user pumps a lot of water from a deep well, they can cause water to drop for other wells even several miles away. The best way to visualize this is to imagine two or three straws stuck in the same milkshake; the straw that plunges down deepest will get the last of the milkshake, even as the ones positioned higher end up coming up dry.
“The amount of groundwater pumping has increased exponentially because of what’s been happening with this dairy. And as that has happened, people’s wells have gone dry,” said Kathy Ferris, a research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. Ferris was one of the architects of Arizona’s landmark 1980 groundwater law, which limited underwater pumping in the state’s main population centers.
“I think we know what the problem is,” she added. “It’s not rocket science.”
A 2018 report from the state water department found that groundwater levels declined by at least 200 feet between 1940 and 2015 in the parts of the Willcox Basin with the most agricultural pumping — and that was before Riverview moved in. An Arizona water official who spoke to High Country News last year said the rate of decline has increased since the dairy arrived.
Other farming-heavy regions across the West are seeing similar stress on their aquifers from unrestricted agricultural pumping and an ongoing megadrought. California has recorded 1,287 dry well reports across the state this year, a 50 percent increase since 2021. One town in the Golden State’s Central Valley may run out of water altogether by the end of the year. The massive Ogallala Aquifer that runs from Nebraska to Texas has also shown signs of severe stress in recent years.
In the Willcox Basin, the groundwater crisis began in the immediate vicinity of Kansas Settlement, but it’s since spread out across the county as Riverview and other large farms expand farther out and draw from new sections of the aquifers that run through the county. The crisis has even started to affect the town of Willcox itself, one of the only incorporated settlements in the area, which is ten miles from Riverview’s operations. Esteban Vasquez spent five years helping manage the town’s water system, and he told Grist that even the town’s deep municipal wells were seeing stress as a result of agricultural pumping.
“There’s seriously something going on down there,” he said. “We were dropping about nine feet a year. People used to think that since we were miles away [from the dairy], that wasn’t really going to affect us and our aquifers, but it was only a matter of time.”
When Vasquez left his job with the town of Willcox and started working for a company that manages small water systems across the county, he encountered the same dry well crisis everywhere he went. According to High Country News, at least 100 wells in the basin went dry between 2014 and 2019.
The proliferation of water issues has cast a pall over the area, making life darker and more difficult for all those who live there. Everyone knows someone whose well has gone dry, or who’s had to deepen their well, or who’s taken to hauling water rather than try to find it on their own property. Many of the haulers are elderly people who live on fixed incomes and can’t afford to invest in wells, so they haul water instead, filling up jugs at a water facility in Willcox and driving them back home multiple times a week. In a county where the median household income is just 70 percent of the national figure, options for those who suddenly find themselves without water are limited.
Even for those who still have water, the effects of the crisis are all too visible. In some parts of the basin, the overpumping of underground aquifers has led to the emergence of fissures in the ground that are dozens of feet deep, some of which have split apart roadways and forced local officials to close them for weeks. Dozens of people have left areas like Kansas Settlement over the past few years after losing water and finding themselves saddled with worthless properties. Vasquez said he knows at least 20 people who’ve left the county due to the recent water issues; Duckels gave a similar estimate.
“A lot of people have abandoned their houses,” said Duckels. “You drive up and down our streets over here. You can see houses that are just decrepit, because the people have literally just had to leave their investments to rot.”
Even as the water crisis grew for years, many locals didn’t understand the scale of the problem. Because the population of the basin is so spread out, many people were not totally aware of the growth of agribusiness in the area. Opposition to megafarms was initially limited to just a few committed locals.
Julia Hamel, who lives about six miles north of the town of Willcox, was one of those people. She refers to dairy owners as “crooked bastards” and sees their expansion as part of a campaign to force out longtime residents like herself.
“These folks at the dairy have forced out families that have been there five generations,” she said of Riverview. “They can’t sell their land because no one wants it without water. Meanwhile [the dairy has] bought miles and miles of land. We’re the ones who get tromped on.”
About ten years ago, as a dairy company called Feria was expanding its operations in the Willcox Basin, Hamel and two of her friends decided to go on offense. They piloted a small plane from a nearby hangar to conduct aerial reconnaissance on Feria’s feedlots, looking out for potential health code violations. Hamel’s friends photographed large ponds she said were full of urine, as well as burning piles of manure, both of which she could smell from miles away. They tried to show the photos to local representatives, but nothing came of it. A few years later, Riverview acquired Feria. (Riverview representatives did not respond to Grist’s multiple requests for comment.)
Stunts like these were rare, but in recent years more people have come over to Hamel’s side. The local “Willcox chit chat” Facebook group has exploded with debates over how much of the responsibility for dry wells can be pinned on agriculture, with many residents blaming Riverview. Vandals have defaced some of the dairy’s signage, and residents have shown up at county meetings to berate public officials for supporting the dairy.
Anje Duckels said she’s concerned that violence will erupt in the area if water supplies continue to drop.
“You get people who see their moms cry because they’re too old to mortgage their house to pay for another well,” said Duckels. “These people are gonna get desperate and crazy. These people are frightening, they’re poor, and they’ve got weapons.”
Ironically, one major demonstration of this outrage was a pressure campaign against a proposal to actually increase local water access. In the years after Riverview arrived, a group of county politicians started to push for the creation of a municipal water district that could ease the burden on individual wells. Rather than having everyone pump water on their own property, the new district would pump water from a deep communal well and pipe it out to households.
But many residents view the proposed district with suspicion or outright hostility — not because they think it wouldn’t deliver water, but because it is supported by Riverview. Gary Fehr, a member of Riverview’s board of directors and grandson of the dairy’s founder, is one of the lead organizers behind the effort.
The water district doesn’t advertise its association with Riverview, and vice versa. But Peggy Judd, a member of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors and a supporter of the water district, told Grist the district wouldn’t have been possible without Fehr and Riverview, which she said has helped finance outreach efforts and donated office space for the endeavor.
“The power and the brainpower behind the district is the dairy, and they’re keeping it quiet. But if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have that gift,” she said.
As a result, many locals consider the water district part of a ploy to make the entire Willcox Basin dependent on Riverview for water access. Rumors have swirled that Fehr is laying the groundwork to build a massive new suburban development in the area: First he’ll dry out everyone’s wells, the logic goes, and then he’ll create a new water district to support the residents of his planned community.
At a series of public meetings about the water district earlier this year, numerous residents cast blame for the crisis on Riverview, suggesting the dairy couldn’t be trusted to solve a problem it had allegedly created.
“The only reason we’re here today is because our water table is going down, and the biggest single reason that water table is going down is because of agricultural pumping,” said one.
“Neighborliness is one of our values in this valley, and good neighbors don’t suck their neighbors’ wells dry,” he added to laughter and applause.
For the moment, the water district project appears to have stalled amid local opposition; the volunteer committee hasn’t held a meeting since June. Fehr did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
Even as residents of the Willcox Basin have spurned the dairy’s proposed water district, many have embraced a far more radical solution: strict regulations on groundwater usage. Decades of anti-regulation sentiment have given way to an unprecedented grassroots campaign for restrictions on new groundwater wells. These restrictions could jeopardize the future growth of industrial farming operations like Riverview.
When Arizona lawmakers drafted the state’s landmark 1980 groundwater law, they were trying to solve an over-pumping problem that had begun to threaten development around the major cities of Phoenix and Tucson. Because most of the state’s population lived in these metropolitan areas, lawmakers focused on slowing new well drilling in urban rather than rural areas. The 1980 bill established so-called “active management areas,” or AMAs, in those two cities, as well as in the agriculture-heavy county that lay between them.
For four decades now, farms and large subdivisions in these areas have been subject to stringent limits on how much groundwater they can pump. Outside these three counties, however, unlimited pumping remained fair game. People in areas like Cochise County didn’t want restrictions on their water, and the potential for overdraft in many of Arizona’s more remote regions was less immediate.
“We knew that there are areas of the state where problems are worse than other areas,” said Ferris, the water expert who helped craft the law. However, “in many rural areas, they just said, ‘go away.’ They didn’t want regulation. They didn’t want us to be managing their groundwater.”
But buried within the 1980 law was a provision that allowed for the possibility that rural communities might change their mind: If residents of a groundwater basin gather enough signatures, the law allows them to propose a ballot question about whether to establish an AMA. If the ballot question wins a majority vote, the state then appoints a committee to supervise groundwater in the basin. The committee can impose restrictions on new irrigation activity, capping the amount of land in the basin that is fed by groundwater.
The proviso has never been used — until now.
In Cochise County, a local librarian and textile artist named Bekah Wilce learned about the clause a few years ago. She had started to worry about the impact of agricultural pumping on her town, Elfrida, which sits in the water basin adjacent to the Willcox Basin. Wilce’s husband, an independent journalist, started to talk with Arizona’s state water department about how large water users could be regulated. Those conversations led him to the 1980 statute, and to the clause allowing communities to form their own AMAs.
Wilce soon got involved with a group of local groundwater activists known as the Arizona Water Defenders. The group had been looking for a solution to the dry-well problem for a few years, and Wilce pitched them on gathering signatures for an AMA ballot question, something that had never been tried in Arizona before.
When Wilce first started working on the AMA campaign, her neighbors warned her that it would be a long shot. Cochise County residents tend to be quite conservative — Donald Trump carried the county by 20 points in the 2020 election — and many are averse to the very idea of regulation. So Wilce was surprised that she and her fellow volunteers had no trouble getting enough signatures. In fact, they submitted 250 more signatures than they needed to get an AMA vote on the ballot — not just in the Willcox Basin but also in the neighboring Douglas Basin, where Wilce lives. Wilce told Grist that the massive growth of big agricultural interests in the area has woken up people who might not have engaged in the past.
“It’s true that it’s a fairly conservative area — and even those on the left side of the spectrum don’t really want a lot of government interference — but I do think we see the need for common-sense limits,” she said. “The dairy has been in place now for a number of years, and people have become increasingly concerned. It’s just been this snowballing tragedy, so there’s this fear.”
The scale of support for the AMA has also surprised Vasquez, the former water systems manager, who said he’s been trying to warn locals about groundwater for years without success.
“I feel like nobody really cared about water before,” he told Grist. “Water conservation was the last thing I felt in people’s minds when it came to this community. So when the AMA got a lot of positive backing behind it, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, that’s crazy, because everybody that I’ve talked to beforehand didn’t give two shits about water.’”
The campaign has deepened the fault lines between farmers — including many small-scale growers unaffiliated with larger newcomers like Riverview — and the rest of the county’s residents. Now that the AMA question is on the ballot, the state has paused all new irrigation in the area until the election, freezing the growth of local agriculture. It isn’t clear how strict the AMA’s ultimate restrictions would be: Should the ballot question pass, the state will appoint a committee that will study the aquifers in the basin and decide what kinds of pumping need to be curbed. Individual households wouldn’t be subject to restrictions, since their wells are too small to meet the legal threshold for regulation, but family farmers might face limits on future growth, and they would need to go through a permitting process to drill new wells. The largest operations would likely be unable to expand at all.
Jacob Collins, a fourth-generation alfalfa farmer who lives just southeast of the town of Willcox, said that the region’s farming community is very worried about new limitations on water usage. Collins farms about 360 acres in total, and there’s a chance an AMA might place a ceiling on the amount of land he can irrigate.
“There’s a lot of fear surrounding a loss of water in the valley, and there’s a lot of fear [about] having our water controlled by an outside entity that isn’t here,” he told Grist. “If we want the valley to continue to be farmable, we do have to do our best to make sure that we’re not using more water than we need, [but] there’s not really anything farmers can do to make a drought not happen.”
These sentiments in the local farming community have led to a backlash against the pro-AMA campaign. A group called Rural Water Assurance, which was co-founded by the president of the county farm bureau, has put up billboards by the Interstate urging a ‘no’ vote on the ballot question. The Willcox Facebook group has seen a proliferation of posts warning of draconian water restrictions. Rural Water Assurance even filed a lawsuit against the Douglas Basin AMA effort in June, alleging that the signatures the group had collected were invalid. A court dismissed the lawsuit in August, finding that the plaintiffs had “wholly failed to demonstrate any legal basis” for the challenge.
Wilce feels confident the AMA vote will pass in the Willcox Basin, and a large chunk of the county’s most engaged voters seem to be on her side. If the outlook for the AMA campaign is bright, though, the outlook for the county’s groundwater is far darker, regardless of which way the vote goes next month.
Even the most stringent regulations might not save people like Duckels from having to leave the valley. At its strongest, the AMA can restrict almost all new pumping, but it can’t order current users to stop drawing water, which means Riverview would get grandfathered in. The dairy wouldn’t be able to expand its operations any further, but it could keep withdrawing water at its current rates. And the groundwater levels in the basin will likely keep dropping.
“You’re just trying to stop the hemorrhaging,” said Ferris.
The depletion of area aquifers will make life harder and harder for people like Duckels. More residents will have to haul water, or spend tens of thousands of dollars to dig new wells, or walk away from their homes and move somewhere else. In the absence of a water district like the one proposed by Riverview, there will be more new dry wells every year, and more people leaving the area. Plus, new limitations on large groundwater pumping will deter new farms and businesses from moving to the county, further sapping its already sluggish economy.
The irony, according to Ferris, is that the dairy can always move somewhere else if it loses water access. There’s a lot of land in the United States, and it’s a lot easier to move cows around than people. The absence of water regulations in the Willcox Basin has allowed Riverview to run down the clock on the area’s future, and the new political backlash against these companies is arriving too late to change that trajectory. Even if residents manage to stymie Riverview, there’s no guarantee the community will survive.
“Industrial ag moved into that basin, and industrial ag can move out of that basin. But everybody else is kind of stuck,” Ferris told Grist. “They’re living there, they invested their livelihood there, and I think the potential outlook is really grim. I think, unless something changes, it becomes a ghost town.”
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