30 October 22
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An assault on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband offers a ghastly echo of the attack on the Capitol.
Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” Others assaulted Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, where staffers had barricaded themselves in an office, searching for her: “Nancy! Nancy Pelosi!” “Where you at, Nancy?” “Where’s Nancy?” The mob ransacked the office, but she was gone, taken to nearby Fort McNair along with other leaders. The rioters were disappointed. “We broke into the Capitol. We got inside. We did our part. We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the frickin’ brain. But we didn’t find her,” one woman said in a selfie video. The crowd was eventually dispersed, and Joe Biden became president two weeks later.
Early today, someone broke into Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, reportedly yelling, “Where is Nancy, where is Nancy?” The speaker was not home, but the intruder attacked her husband, Paul, sending him to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The San Francisco police say the suspect, who is in custody, took a hammer from Paul Pelosi and attacked him with it. Officials also say he expressed extreme right-wing views on social media. He has been charged with a number of felonies, including attempted homicide.
Preliminary details of incidents like this are not always accurate, and police accounts are sometimes unreliable. But the ghastly echo of the bloodthirsty crowd at the Capitol suggests that the victory of democracy is still uncertain. Not only was the insurrection not defeated, but January 6 never ended.
The spectacle of an armed mob assaulting the Capitol, with the encouragement of the president, on January 6, seems to have inspired a new wave of threats and political violence. Such violence is not new to American politics, having waxed and waned over time, but has lately been on an upsurge.
Not all of these attacks target Democrats or Trump opponents. A man attempted to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June, and another attacked Representative Lee Zeldin, the GOP nominee for New York governor, in July. Some are not ideological, such as a Wisconsin judge’s assassination in June that seems to have stemmed from a personal grievance. But an armed man repeatedly menaced Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal’s home in Seattle. A man was killed in August after attacking an FBI office in Cincinnati, following an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reports frequent death threats. These follow horrifying acts of political violence during the Trump administration.
Establishing motivation for vicious personal attacks is complicated. Many of these attackers are not of sound mind, and may be harnessing their own personal demons to political causes, though the same was true of some of the January 6 attackers. Politicians using violent rhetoric or encouraging violence offer them an outlet.
The riot was the most acute expression of political anger on January 6, but it was also the culmination of a months-long effort by Trump and his allies to subvert the 2020 election. This systemic threat remains very alive too. Not only are some irredentists still demanding vainly that the 2020 election be “decertified” and Trump returned to office, but scores if not hundreds of candidates who do not accept the results of the election will win office next month—some of them in positions that will give them sway over future elections.
On the evening of January 6, Pelosi and other leaders insisted that Congress return to the Capitol that night and finish the work of certifying the election. A year later, Pelosi looked back and declared, “Democracy won.” That was a comforting notion. Today, it seems clear that the battle that started on January 6 is still raging. The threats to the Constitution and to the lives of elected officials will be with us for a long time to come.
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David DePape is shown in Berkeley, Calif., in 2013. (photo: Michael Short/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)
David DePape, 42, also published hundreds of blog posts in recent months sharing memes in support of fringe commentators and far-right personalities. Many of the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.
During October, DePape published over 100 posts. While each loads, a reader briefly glimpses an image of a person wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume, superimposed against a night sky. The photos and videos that followed were often dark and disturbing.
He published a drawing of the Devil kneeling and asking a caricature of a Jewish person to teach him the arts of “lying, deception, cheating and incitement.” Several contain lifelike images of rotting human flesh and blood, including a zombified Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton. Others depict headless bodies against bleak, dystopian landscapes.
Before those writings were removed Saturday, The Washington Post reviewed them, as well as gory photos, illustrations and videos on a website that DePape registered under his name in early August and that his daughter confirmed was his. Notably, the voluminous writings do not mention Pelosi. Police say DePape broke into the home Pelosi shares with her husband early Friday, yelled “Where is Nancy?” and attacked 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
Pelosi remained hospitalized Saturday, recovering from surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hand, according to the speaker’s office. San Francisco’s police chief and district attorney provided no update, but on Friday local, state and federal authorities said they were working together to investigate DePape’s motive.
A woman who identified DePape as her “father” said Friday that she was stunned by his arrest even though he was, she said, abusive to other members of the family. “I love my father,” Inti Gonzalez wrote in a statement posted to her website and later removed. “He did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”
“This attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband came as a shock to me,” wrote Gonzalez, who is 21, according to her website. “I didn’t see this coming and there was no sign of the possibility from his end.” Gonzalez wrote she followed her father’s writing online but was not aware of the website he registered in August.
Reached by The Post before she issued the statement, Gonzalez declined to comment about DePape.
DePape grew up in British Columbia, a relative told CNN. He briefly drew public attention nearly a decade ago in San Francisco when he participated in a demonstration against a city ordinance banning public nudity. The protest was led by Gonzalez’s mother, Gypsy Taub, an outspoken nudity activist.
Videos posted on YouTube show that DePape was among a group of protesters marching through San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood for the 2013 demonstration.
On his blog, DePape wrote bitterly in recent months of his relationship with Taub, who also promoted debunked conspiracy theories on her own blog, including that 9/11 was an “inside job.” He accused Taub of manipulating her children to turn them against him.
Taub is serving a sentence for felony stalking and attempted child abduction, after prosecutors said she became fixated with a 14-year-old boy and attempted to kidnap him. She could not be reached for comment. Gonzalez told The Post that she had spoken with Taub and that Taub would be making a statement upon her release. She is eligible for parole in January.
Four days before the Pelosi attack, DePape posted on his website what he presented as a 2021 email to Gonzalez. In it, he told her he struggled with the urge to end his life as his relationship with Taub and her children was falling apart. “I was extremely suicidal, Mentally I would beg you guys daily to let me kill myself,” he wrote in the email. DePape cut off contact with Taub and her children after he was he was kicked out of their home and living in a car, according to his online account. He does not say when those events occurred.
The domain frenlyfrens.com was registered Aug. 8 under DePape’s name and to an address in Richmond, Calif., where a neighbor told a Post reporter he lived. The web address uses the phonetic spelling of “friend,” which has become a slang term adopted by many in the far right — a term that is sometimes written as an acronym for Far Right Ethno-Nationalist.
Reddit banned an openly anti-semitic group by the name /r/FrenWorld in 2019, saying it contained postings that glorified or encouraged violence. One cartoon featured repeatedly by members contained pictures of a frog character that has been appropriated by the far right. “Frens, sound the alarms!” one says. “Arm yourselves! The longnose is coming, the longnose is coming.”
Two weeks after registering the site, DePape’s first post was titled “Mary Poppins.” Amid the ongoing feud between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Disney over the company’s criticism of the state’s law known by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill, the violent video depicted a SWAT team firing at Poppins.
Details of DePape’s everyday life in recent months are included in the postings that followed. He played video games at a nearby library and spent hours meditating, according to the writings. In another post, he shared an image of a fantasy miniature salamander he purchased on Etsy. He wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy but was frustrated that the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy. “They have lots of fairy houses but NONE of them are MADE for fairies,” he wrote.
In late August, DePape became engrossed in the decision by Twitter to ban Jordan Peterson for his posts about transgender people. The Canadian psychologist turned conservative podcaster had once said that being transgender was comparable to “satanic ritual abuse.”
DePape published six posts in support of Peterson and then continued with his own caustic takes on transgender people, saying they should not be a protected group. “They were not BORN a freak. They are not INHERENTLY a freak threw no fault of their own. … They are CHOOSING to be FREAKS,” he wrote in one post.
In the last week of September, as the Justice Department filed a motion seeking to compel former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to return government emails, DePape blogged his take: “No evidence of election fraud. Any journalist saying that should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”
DePape was also active on the message board 4chan, a site notorious for extremist discussion, posting memes and debating other anonymous users about his beliefs, according to his website. In an Oct. 24 post titled “Disinfo Shill Tactics,” he complained that he was a target of law enforcement he described as ‘paid shills’ trying to manipulate the message board. “I would come in and lay out the facts and so all the paid shills would jump on me. To try and suppress it,” he wrote.
That same day, DePape shared images from a construction site where he worked months ago. One highlighted a jackhammer with the number 33 on it, an apparent reference to a conspiracy theory about Freemasons and world control. A co-worker remarked he sounded like the now deceased right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh after referring to feminists as “feminazis” during a discussion on feminism, according to the account.
In another post on Oct. 24, four days before the attack on Pelosi, DePape shared images of a wooden birdhouse he said he had purchased for an invisible fairy he communicated with that had begun interfering with his life. “He appears in a form that makes sense in my reality because I can’t see fairies. He’ll do things to let me know its him and he o[f]ten appears as a bird,” he wrote.
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The entrance to Camp Delta where detainees from the U.S. war in Afghanistan live is shown April 7, 2004, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
In 2003, Paracha a former businessman and TV producer, was arrested by U.S. authorities on suspicion of affiliation with al-Qaida. Last year, Guantánamo's Periodic Review Board determined that Paracha was no longer a significant threat to the U.S.
On Saturday, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry confirmed Paracha's arrival, adding that it was glad to see him "finally reunited with his family."
Paracha is at least the fourth person who has been released from Guantánamo this year. It is part of President Biden's efforts to reduce the population of detainees at Guantánamo and ultimately close the facility.
With Paracha's return home, 35 detainees remain at Guantánamo Bay, according to the Department of Defense. Twenty are eligible for transfer and three are eligible for a review board. Nine others are involved in the military commission process and three detainees have been convicted.
ExxonMobil oil refinery at sunrise at Port-Jerome-sur-Seine, France. (photo: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters)
Oil company’s third-quarter result smashes Wall Street forecasts – as does Chevron’s £11.2bn
Exxon’s $19.7bn profit for the third quarter outstripped the record $17.9bn it reported for the previous quarter, as it became the latest fossil fuel producer to enjoy soaring earnings, a day after Shell announced global profits of $9.5bn between July and September.
The results came as another US oil company, Chevron, reported a quarterly profit of $11.2bn, its second-highest ever, as it also stormed past analysts’ estimates. This was slightly lower than the previous quarter, but almost double the $6.1bn profit the company made during the same period a year earlier.
Together the two largest US oil companies have earned more than $30bn in three months.
Oil companies have raked in record profits in recent months, thanks to the surge in the price of oil and natural gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, causing soaring energy bills for consumers and businesses.
Western sanctions on Moscow have pushed global economies to look elsewhere for their energy, and US exports of gas and oil to Europe have jumped, setting oil companies on the path to record high earnings.
The French oil group TotalEnergies reported third-quarter profits of nearly $10bn on Thursday, almost double the amount for the same period a year earlier.
ExxonMobil’s profit between July and September brought it within touching distance of the $20.7bn earned by Apple over the same period.
The oil company said its profits, double those made by Shell during the same period, were the result of “strong volume performance, including record refining volumes, rigorous cost control and higher natural gas realisations”. It said this more than offset lower crude oil prices and weaker industry refining margins.
Oil prices have fallen from their highs of $120 a barrel of Brent crude in June to about $96, while natural gas prices have dropped to about 70% lower than their peak in late August.
Exxon’s chief financial officer, Kathryn Mikells, said: “Our investments over the past five years, including through the lows of the pandemic, are really driving our results today.”
The company made $43bn during the first nine months of the year, 19% more than during the same period in 2008, when oil was trading at record levels of about $140 a barrel.
High energy prices have also attracted political attention. Joe Biden said in June: “We’re going to make sure everybody knows Exxon’s profits.” He added: “Exxon made more money than God this year.”
Chevron’s chief executive, Michael Wirth, hailed “another quarter of strong financial performance”, in a statement to investors. He noted that its oil and gas production at the top US shale field reached “another quarterly record”.
The company said it had paid out dividends of $2.7bn to investors during the quarter, which was 6% higher than during the same period a year earlier.
Chevron said it had increased investment during the past three months, and was focusing on its “traditional and new energy businesses to help meet the world’s growing demand”.
Meanwhile, Exxon’s record profits were helped by its much-criticised decision to pin its future hopes on fossil fuels, even at a time when its European competitors have shifted their attention to more renewables.
The company said it had spent $5.7bn on new oil and gas projects over the past quarter, a 24% increase on a year earlier, and it remained on track to hit its investment target of between $21bn and $24bn this year.
Both Exxon and Chevron’s shares continued to climb during morning trading on Friday after releasing their results.
Rising profits at oil companies have led to renewed calls on both sides of the Atlantic for the businesses to invest their soaring profits instead of buying back shares.
Shell’s confirmation on Thursday that it had not paid the UK’s windfall tax, despite making record global profits, also prompted calls for a rethink of the levy, which was intended to raise billions to help with the cost of living crisis.
The discussion is likely to be reignited when BP reports its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday next week.
Medical workers early Sunday transporting a victim of the Halloween crush in the Itaewon district of Seoul. (photo: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Seoul Crowd Crush
Shows Gaps in Korean Safety Rules, Experts Say
As many as 100,000 people were celebrating in a popular nightlife district in the center of the South Korean capital.
Dozens more were injured, many of them seriously, according to a fire department spokesman.
As many as 100,000 people were celebrating Halloween in Itaewon, an area of central Seoul popular for its nightlife. The holiday had long been a neighborhood favorite before being interrupted by coronavirus restrictions imposed on the city two years ago, and young people flocked to parties on Saturday night.
By Sunday morning, costume-clad partygoers had fled a scene strewn with the bodies of young revelers as chaos and confusion reigned. At news conferences, officials said they had no clear idea of what caused the crush, or how the annual festival had devolved so quickly into the country’s worst peacetime tragedy since 2014.
As images of lifeless bodies piled atop each other and queues of emergency workers pushing gurneys loaded with the dead circulated across social media, Koreans demanded answers and accountability.
Kim Geun-jin, a division commander for the Seoul police, said that little could be reported about the cause of the disaster as of 4 a.m. on Sunday because “identifying the victims is our top priority.” He added: “Our forensic teams are focused on identifying victims and collecting evidence from the site.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning, residents congregated at hospitals and makeshift mortuaries looking for their loved ones. Most of the killed were teenagers or in their 20s, Mr. Choi said. The dead included two foreigners, added Mr. Choi, who did not specify their nationalities.
At one ad hoc mortuary, at the Wonhyoro Multipurpose Indoor Gymnasium, just west of Itaewon, the bodies of 45 young people were arrayed on the floor beneath plastic sheets. Many still wore the costumes they had donned for a night of partying, one way distraught relatives would be able to identify them.
Kim Seo-jeong, 17, a high school student who dressed in a traditional Chinese qipao to go clubbing in the area, said that by 8 p.m. the alley near the Itaewon subway station was already too crowded to walk.
“We gave up an hour later and tried to turn around to go home but we could not move in the other direction either,” Ms. Kim said in a telephone interview. “There were people pushing from behind us. There were people in front of us pushing down the hill to go in the other direction.”
Later, a group of young men made a hard shove down the hill, chanting “Push! Push!”
“A person in front of me slipped and fell, pushing me down as well. People behind me fell like dominoes,” Ms. Kim said. “There were people beneath me and people falling on top of me. I could hardly breathe. We shouted and screamed for help, but the music was so loud in the alley our shouts were drowned.”
The crush began at a narrow roadway right outside Exit 2 of the Itaewon subway station, in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s more international and freewheeling neighborhoods, near a row of bars that included, among others, Oasis Bar & Cafe, Gathering and Ravo — a blazing neon magnet for young people looking for a good time. A big sign in yellow, red, pink and blue letters read, “Happy Halloween.”
Around 11 p.m., officials began sending alerts urging people to avoid Itaewon. Benedict Manlapaz, a filmmaker visiting from New York, arrived at the station about an hour later to see the streets jammed with crowds. The people, he said, were “irritated,” with some crying.
“People were shoulder to shoulder,” said Mr. Manlapaz, 23.
Witnesses said the police appeared to have trouble maintaining control of the crowds. And images posted to social media showed scores of bodies piled atop one another in the narrow alley as emergency crews worked to pull them free.
“Our people are so insensitive about public safety,” Ms. Kim said. “The government should have sent more police to control the crowd. There was a Halloween crowd in Itaewon last year despite the pandemic. The government should have anticipated a much bigger crowd this year because most of the pandemic restrictions are gone.”
Officials initially said that many of those killed had lapsed into cardiac arrest. Citizens, police officers and emergency medical workers were seen performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on people sprawled on the pavement. Later, a grim lineup of bodies covered by sheets or towels appeared before rescue workers could begin carrying them away.
More than 800 emergency workers and police officers from around the nation, including all available personnel in Seoul, were deployed to the streets to treat the injured.
But ambulances and police vehicles struggled to make their way to and from the site, with roads jammed and pedestrians spilling into traffic.
“It was so bad we couldn’t even see the road,” said Jeong Sol, 30, of Seoul. “The crowd was so large that it had spilled off the sidewalks onto the street.”
She added: “We were shoved around a lot. People were pushed and dragged, irrespective of who they were.”
Officials batted down speculative theories, including that a gas leak had spurred people into the alleyway, but they proffered no alternative explanation as to what happened. Instead, residents were left to blame the police and the country’s already embattled president.
The disaster, South Korea’s worst since the Sewol ferry sank in 2014, killing more than 300 people, will likely add to the litany of political woes facing President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who has dealt with low approval ratings and diplomatic misfires since taking office in May.
“The top priority is to evacuate and save the victims,” Mr. Yoon told his cabinet, according to his office. “We should take them to urgent medical treatment as quickly as possible.”
The tragedy was Asia’s second crowd disaster in less than a month, after a soccer match on Oct. 1, in Malang, Indonesia, ended with 125 people dead. Spectators trying to flee a stadium were crushed after police officers clashing with unruly fans fired tear gas into the crowd.
Condolences poured into South Korea, including from President Joseph R. Biden. “The alliance between our two countries has never been more vibrant or more vital — and the ties between our people are stronger than ever,” he said in a statement. “The United States stands with the Republic of Korea during this tragic time.”
Migrants crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States near Eagle Pass, Texas. (photo: Allison Dinner/AFP/Getty Images)
Eagle Pass has been a way station for undocumented immigrants for years, but recently their numbers have grown – and residents are divided
By virtue of its location along the Rio Grande, the scenic but all too often deadly river that delineates the border between Texas and Mexico, the course is surrounded by different iterations of boundary fences and international bridges.
And inevitably, Guerrero’s weekly round doubles as a front-row seat to watch people crossing the international line.
“You just see them and wonder what their life is like. You know?” he said.
Migrants arrive in Eagle Pass by wading across the Rio Grande, often carrying their children or a backpack filled with their worldly possessions. Sometimes they stray on to the golf greens.
But eventually, US border patrol agents catch up to them wherever they are, and Guerrero described how sometimes he sees them being dumped in the middle of the international bridge, expelled back to the Mexican side.
To him, the whole thing is sad. On the one hand, he recognizes that “these people are struggling”, probably trying to escape harm and suffering at home. On the other, he remarked: “There are so many of them.
“Every time I’ve been here, there’s somebody,” Guerrero told the Guardian from his golf cart. “There are large groups. There might be smaller groups. But there’s always somebody.”
In recent months, Eagle Pass has become a city of strangers. One group has traveled far to get here, and it’s not unusual to see migrants walking along the road until a government vehicle pulls up. Ask them where they’re from, and many will say Honduras, or Cuba, their goal to surrender themselves to authorities and ask for asylum as soon as they reach US soil.
Then there is a second group of outsiders, deployed in uniform to Eagle Pass by Texas’s hardline Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who states their mission as “securing” an “overrun” border.
Ahead of the midterm elections, in which Abbott is being challenged by Democrat Beto O’Rourke, local hotel parking lots are filled with state trooper and other law enforcement vehicles as Texas has poured a staggering $4bn into a border crackdown. By the numbers alone, however, Abbott’s infamous Operation Lone Star has done little to consistently curb border crossings.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to expel would-be asylum seekers to Mexico – now including Venezuelans trying to enter without documents, in a recent change of policy – seemingly in violation of domestic and international law, while perpetuating its longtime practices of deterrence and surveillance.
Caught between all these external competing interests are the roughly 29,000 people who actually live in Eagle Pass, who feel decidedly mixed about the migrants whose arrival in their own back yards is spurring a national immigration debate.
“There’s been, I guess, a change of heart,” said one, Manuel Mello III, chief of the Eagle Pass fire department. “At first, we didn’t mind. You know, it was just migrants. We’ve had them all our lives. But after a while, it did become a burden.”
For his department, the border-related emergencies never seem to end.
First, he explained, there is a drowning. Then someone’s in critical condition, believed to have jumped off a speeding trailer that was being chased by the border patrol. Shortly after, a young woman’s legs have been severed in a railroad accident.
Some of the calls involve children. Firefighters find babies and toddlers at the river’s edge, already drowned or fighting for breath.
“Sick leave has increased, and it’s very understandable. [The firefighters] are stressed out. Some of them have been seeing this too long, so I guess part of it is PTSD,” Mello said.
“It’s overwhelming to see a child of that age on the river’s edge pass away, and then go back home and relate that with your children.”
The wider community is also living under this constant specter of migrant deaths, and some residents feel conflicted about how law enforcement officials are handling the situation.
For instance, Rosalinda Medrano recalls hearing a radio news story about a border patrol agent who reportedly saw someone drowning close by, but didn’t help.
“That brought me a sadness in regards to being a human. You know, what type of a person has that job?” she said.
Medrano worked for several years as a clinician for unaccompanied migrant children, and she developed a deeper understanding of how families are running from unlivable conditions in their home countries to the US, looking for safety.
“I wish it was just much easier, if they’re seeking asylum, for them just to cross over,” she said. “But at the same time, it’s an incredible amount of individuals that are crossing.”
Research suggests that hardline deterrence policies don’t end migration. Instead, they funnel vulnerable migrants who will come anyway into far more dangerous places, like the Rio Grande or the desert beyond.
But over at the fire station, Mello still believes the federal government could “step it up a little bit more” and “put a stop” to “this madness”.
Eagle Pass has long been a way station for non-citizens to reach other parts of the US, and the community has traditionally been mostly accepting.
Pepe Aranda, Eagle Pass’s former mayor who also served as county judge, has memories of migrants from when he was just three or four years old. People would run in front of his house after crossing the river, but his mom would tell him not to worry. They were just passing through, looking for work.
And when Medrano was a child, her mother would bring tacos and water to people hiding in the tall grass near their home.
But in recent years, as more people have started transiting through the small city, public sentiment has shifted.
The regional border patrol sector that includes Eagle Pass has now reported that it has surpassed the Rio Grande Valley sector further south-east for the most apprehensions of those crossing the border unlawfully so far during the 2022 fiscal year, sometimes more than 1,000 people a day.
Aranda said: “People don’t really have a clear idea that they’re [often] asking for asylum, OK? They’re all looking at ‘Everybody coming over are “bad hombres”, bad people. They’re here to do all the wrong stuff.’”
Rightwing media airs and publishes clickbait coverage that appeals to an anti-immigration stance, and on social media, Aranda’s friends post dehumanizing images alerting their community to groups of migrants who have just arrived, as if they are dangerous and need to be watched, vigilante-style.
Some of this vitriol is a new trend, which Aranda attributes to the rise of Trumpism. But discrimination more broadly has always been a factor in the lives of brown people in Texas.
“Why do we treat ’em differently?” Aranda asked. “Well, it has to go back [a long way]. We have always been treated differently.”
Much of the loudest anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from younger generations, many of whom work in law enforcement or whose friends or spouses are part of the border patrol. For them, immigration is not just a political issue – it’s what pays the bills.
Meanwhile, a brand-new Texas department of public safety (DPS) facility in Eagle Pass is bright, shiny and large, dwarfing the former DPS outpost just down the road.
Since March 2021, the DPS has been managing Abbott’s highly controversial Operation Lone Star alongside the Texas military department. For migrants, that has meant de facto immigration enforcement by the state rather than the federal government, using the mechanism of arrests and jail time for trespassing on private property that comes under departmental jurisdiction – in a state where around 95% of the land is private.
However, for local workers, contractors and business owners, the fraught Operation Lone Star and border enforcement more generally have represented an economic opportunity. That new DPS building required materials and labor for construction, and at the budget hotels where troopers spend the night, single rooms are now going for hundreds of dollars.
In a small city where over a quarter of the residents live in poverty, this influx of money matters.
Even the fire department is receiving $400,000 from Abbott to pay personnel for overtime and buy a new ambulance exclusively for immigration-related calls, Mello said. In his view, the state government “has been doing a lot to help with the immigration problem”.
Aranda is more skeptical.
“As a former elected official, I see too much money that’s being spent for what I would call politically motivated actions that are being done in our community,” he said.
Abbott has also been spending on herding asylum seekers on to buses and dispatching them to New York City and Washington DC without any liaison with the authorities in those Democratic-led cities.
With the midterm elections just days away, Aranda can’t help but see political machinations at play.
“This is probably the most expensive campaign Texas taxpayers have [ever] had for the office of governor,” he said.
Miles Hatfield at his Kentucky home, which he had to abandon after it was flooded by runoff from an old coal mine. (photo: Kristian Thacker/Bloomberg)
Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.
Love Branch used to be owned by one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. Federal law requires companies to clean up the land when they finish mining — and Love Branch hasn't produced any coal in more than a decade. But the former owner, now named Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc., transferred the mine and its cleanup obligations to a smaller company in 2018, the year before Hatfield fell through his floor.
"They pretty well destroyed me up there," says Hatfield, 70, who had to move to a rental nearby. "Everything for me is gone."
Kentucky regulators have said that Love Branch caused the flooding of Hatfield's home and those of his neighbors above Deer Lick Road. But Alpha isn't responsible because it transferred the mine's permit to another company called Lexington Coal. Mining permits apply to a specific patch of land and can be transferred from one company to another with the approval of state regulators.
Alpha has transferred more than 300 mining permits to smaller companies since 2015, when an industrywide downturn pushed it and other big coal companies into bankruptcy. By shedding those permits, more than it currently holds, the company also freed itself from the responsibility to clean up the mines. Those old Alpha permits are now owned by smaller companies like Lexington, many of them in precarious financial shape. The smaller companies have drawn pollution lawsuits, environmental violations and complaints from distraught homeowners like Hatfield.
While coal's devastating contribution to climate change has been well documented, it has also left a long and painful legacy in communities where it's mined. A joint investigation by Bloomberg News and NPR found that Alpha is one of several large U.S. coal companies that used the same playbook. They transferred old mines in need of cleanup to smaller operators with meager financial resources, raising the risk that taxpayers, rather than industry, will eventually be stuck with the cost.
And the very weakness of these new owners limits regulators' powers. Anything officials might do to enforce environmental laws — from issuing fines, halting coal production or revoking permits — hampers the new owners and could result in even less money to restore blighted landscapes.
The cleanup obligations held by just three of these new owners in multiple states amounts to more than $800 million, according to a Bloomberg News analysis based on mine-permit data and per-acre reclamation costs contained in a West Virginia legislative audit.
To guarantee their obligations, these companies — Lexington, Blackjewel LLC and ERP Environmental Fund Inc. — have posted bonds of less than half that amount, leaving a potential shortfall of about $480 million, the analysis shows. Blackjewel filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and is currently in liquidation, and ERP has been in court-supervised receivership since 2020.
Coal companies that filed for bankruptcy have offloaded about $17 billion in miner pension and retiree health care costs that is now mostly the responsibility of the federal government, according to a United Mine Workers of America estimate. Many of these companies are now posting record profits thanks to a surging coal market.
Alpha said in a statement that it is proud of its environmental record and that its transactions were part of a transition from thermal coal, which is burned to make electricity, to metallurgical coal used to produce steel. "These transactions are subject to significant oversight, requiring the review and approval of a number of government regulators," the company said. "In many cases, Alpha has included funding within such transactions for reclamation and other liabilities."
Lexington said it would respond to questions from Bloomberg but didn't.
For people who live near those idled mines, the flooding, the polluted streams and the damaged homes can be overwhelming.
Hatfield has moved to a new home, and he says he hates writing rent checks after working decades to pay off the mortgage on his old house by the Love Branch mine. He says Lexington paid him $1,500 for the right to drive onto his land about two years ago and bury a pipe that's supposed to redirect all the water, but it hasn't helped. And he's not holding out hope that an Alpha or Lexington executive will offer to pay for a new floor. "I'd tell him I'd greatly appreciate it if they'd make things right," Hatfield says. "He'd probably laugh at me because he knows he'll get away with it."
Coal has left behind a complicated legacy
Regulators fined Lexington $30,000 in June for failing to clean up the Love Branch mine and stop the flooding. Lexington said in a July filing that it doesn't admit responsibility for any damage and that it needs more time to finish reclamation, which under federal law requires returning the land to its original shape, planting native vegetation and preventing future flooding or toxic runoff.
Coal is inextricably tied to the story of how the U.S. became a superpower. It was used to forge weapons used in the American Revolution. Over the next two centuries, as coal producers extracted the energy that powered the nation, they also destroyed millions of acres of productive land. Mining left behind more than 50,000 underground mine openings, and it polluted tens of thousands of miles of rivers and streams. But there were no federal rules requiring coal companies to mitigate the damage.
In 1977, Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), creating federal minimum cleanup standards and a bonding system to help cover the costs if companies walked away from their obligations. From that point on, coal companies were supposed to restore land as they mined.
Joe Pizarchik, who ran the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement during the Obama administration, says the law eliminated almost 50,000 underground mine openings and more than 1,000 miles of dangerous cliffs left behind by coal mining.
But as coal companies began struggling to compete with cheaper natural gas more than a decade ago, they started offloading their cleanup obligations. Alpha would follow that same strategy.
How asset transfers and bankruptcy worked to coal's advantage
Alpha was the creation of private equity. First Reserve Corp., a Connecticut-based leveraged buyout pioneer in the energy industry, bought three coal companies in 2002. By 2006 it had taken Alpha public and sold its ownership stake. But over the next five years Alpha kept buying up other companies, culminating in its purchase of Massey Energy Co., the biggest coal company in central Appalachia. Massey had been shaken by a 2010 explosion that killed 29 people, the worst U.S. coal mining disaster in 40 years. Alpha paid $7 billion for Massey less than a year later.
Abundant natural gas brought online through hydraulic fracturing dealt the coal industry a tremendous blow. By early 2015, the amount of U.S. electricity produced by gas overtook coal for the first time. One by one, the giants began to fall. Patriot Coal Corp. filed for bankruptcy in May 2015. Alpha filed that August, and Arch Coal Inc. followed in January 2016. Then bankruptcy came for the biggest private-sector coal company in the world, Peabody Energy Corp., whose record of environmental damage was memorialized by singer-songwriter John Prine.
Arch and Peabody didn't respond to requests for comment.
The corporate reorganizations saved the industry — in part by shifting liabilities to taxpayers. Josh Macey co-wrote the Stanford Law Review article "Bankruptcy as Bailout," which described how the four coal companies used the federal bankruptcy system to shed billions of dollars of environmental and labor obligations.
U.S. bankruptcy law aims to get foundering companies back on their feet by canceling debts they have no hope of paying. But critics like Macey, now a law professor at the University of Chicago, say the code is ill-equipped to deal with obligations imposed by labor or environmental laws. These can get short shrift in bankruptcy, he wrote in the article, allowing companies to essentially use the courts to invalidate regulations they don't want to follow.
When coal companies shift their old mines to shaky owners, he went on to say, those transactions should be viewed as fraudulent transfers — the technical term for moving assets in order to stiff creditors.
"This is a slight exaggeration," Macey says in an interview, "but it's like they say, 'I'm going to give all these liabilities to my destitute neighbor.' You can't imagine that cleanup will actually happen."
Alpha also shed in its bankruptcy about $2.2 billion in pension obligations and health care costs, according to a United Mine Workers of America estimate, plus another $494 million in black lung benefits, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
If coal companies abandon their black lung obligations, the federal government picks up most of the bill. The U.S. government also covers most of the unpaid pension liabilities and other health care benefits promised to miners. A bill introduced by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and passed in 2019 lifted the amount of taxpayer funds that can go toward those payments to $750 million a year.
But even after shedding more than $2 billion in labor obligations, Alpha still had a problem: State and federal regulators objected to a plan for its lenders to take ownership of the company's productive mines while leaving hefty reclamation costs in a separate company. "Alpha cannot simply walk away from those obligations," the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection said in objecting to the plan.
Alpha settled the objections by agreeing to set aside more than $300 million for reclamation so it could exit bankruptcy and resume operations. But not long after that, Alpha made another announcement.
Rather than do the cleanup work itself, it handed off idle mines and more than $300 million to Lexington, a much smaller company with little exploitable coal. Instead of an open-ended commitment to pay whatever was required, Alpha's obligations were now capped. Alpha's CEO said the deal would accelerate the cleanup. His counterpart at Lexington spoke in a statement of a "five-year timetable" for reclamation.
Five years have passed, and signs of progress are scarce. Of the 232 permits Alpha transferred to Lexington, only 41 have been fully cleaned up, state records show. By another measure, Lexington is doing even worse: Of the $190 million of bonds that regulators required it to post to guarantee reclamation, they have authorized the release of just $24 million, or about 13%, according to state data compiled by Bloomberg and by Appalachian Voices, an environmental advocacy organization.
Amid all the damage, few signs of cleanup
Junior Walk sees that unfinished work every day.
The 32-year-old environmental activist with Coal River Mountain Watch spends his days driving an old Subaru along back roads in West Virginia and flying drones to peer down on the gray moonscapes created by coal mining. With a black Glock strapped to his hip, he patrols thousands of acres once mined by Alpha. His reports have prompted unannounced inspections and kept regulators focused on reclamation issues.
Walk came by his distrust for coal companies early while growing up in Raleigh County: He says he couldn't drink the water in his own home as a teen because of mine runoff, and he isn't hopeful that Alpha or any other company will step up now.
"These billion-dollar corporations are going to do whatever they want to do because they own the state," he said one day in July, as branches slapped the dirty windshield of his car bumping up a steep dirt road in southern West Virginia. "And what they want to do is whatever's cheapest for them and worst for us."
Near the top of the mountain, he pulled the car off the road, eyed the grass for rattlers, then snapped the propellers onto his drone. It rose with a loud buzz and was soon far above us, looking toward the Twilight complex across the valley, a collection of surface mines now owned by Lexington with a circumference of more than a dozen miles.
Lexington is actively mining coal at Twilight and has racked up more than 20 violations there, including dumping so much dirt into a stream that muddy water could be seen from "bank to bank" 7 miles downstream. The nearby Crescent mine, which Lexington also took over from Alpha, has been the subject of more than 30 environmental violations and about $50,000 in fines for failing to control runoff and letting boulders roll downhill to damage trees.
The company was issued 53 state and federal violations this year through mid-June, more than all but one other miner in the U.S., a federal database shows. That's up from 31 in the same period last year.
The situation has gotten so bad that West Virginia regulators took the extreme step of suspending Lexington's Crescent permit in early September. And the federal judge overseeing a lawsuit accusing Lexington of polluting streams and rivers at two other mines told the company he was "losing patience" with its lack of progress and imposed a $1,500 per day fine.
Regulators in West Virginia and Kentucky defended their decisions to allow Alpha to shift its cleanup obligations to Lexington, pointing out that they have limited powers to block transfers if applicants meet basic requirements. The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet noted that the transfer took place amid a "severely depressed coal market."
If a coal company goes broke, states have two layers of backup funding available to pay unmet cleanup costs. The first is the bond that companies are required to post as a condition of mining, typically backed by an insurance company, though some states, including West Virginia, don't require bond amounts that cover all anticipated costs. The second is the state reclamation fund, typically supported by a tax on coal. Only if both of those sources run out is there a risk taxpayers will have to foot the bill for an abandoned mine.
In response to questions about Lexington, the West Virginia DEP said the state reclamation fund would shoulder any expenses in the event of a shortfall. Not everyone is so confident; a report last year by West Virginia legislative auditors warned that the cost of abandoned mine permits could exceed the reclamation fund by hundreds of millions of dollars, eventually threatening to stick taxpayers with the losses.
Lexington said in a letter to Coal River Mountain Watch last year that it believes environmental stewardship is integral to coal mining and that it strives for full compliance with environmental regulations. "The majority of LCC's [Lexington Coal Company's] active work company wide is reclamation," it said.
Alpha offloaded mines that were later acquired by other companies with leaders who have been accused of wrongdoing or a history of environmental violations. More than 30 permits in Virginia and Kentucky were transferred to an affiliate of Blackjewel, which then went bankrupt. They were later acquired by a company whose president, Hunter Hobson, was arrested this year on unrelated charges that he bribed a coal company in Egypt.
(Hobson pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers didn't respond to emails seeking comment.)
About 40 more permits went to Pristine Clean Energy LLC, which has racked up more than 400 unresolved violations of federal and state laws, among the most of any miner, a federal database shows. In September, a judge fined the company about $650,000 for discharging selenium from one of its mines. Lawyers for the company didn't respond to a request for comment.
Selenium in high concentrations becomes toxic for animals that lay eggs, such as insects, fish and birds. It causes deformities including bent spines, misshapen jaws and eyes in the wrong places. Selenium builds up in the bodies of spiders that eat the bugs and in the birds that eat the spiders. Some of the highest concentrations of the element ever recorded in wildlife came from samples taken near coal mines in West Virginia.
Selenium is just one of the threats to Appalachia, home to one of the oldest and most biodiverse mountainous ecosystems on Earth. Some streams near mining areas are laced with sulfuric acid, salts and metals such as aluminum and iron, which turn the water orange.
Emily Bernhardt, a professor of biology at Duke University, estimates that 30% or more of the river networks in one section of southern West Virginia are now too degraded to support the most sensitive species found there. "The people living in this once-beautiful landscape," she says, "are now living in a landscape that is really, really altered."
Life near old mines, just as climate change worsens flooding
Halfway between Musick and Pie, in rural West Virginia, there's a hardtop road with houses built alongside a burbling creek. Gary VanNatter, another former coal miner, lives in one of them. Idle coal mines sit up the road, and VanNatter is used to seeing runoff. But he wasn't prepared for the flood of orange-colored water that filled his garage ankle-deep one day in July.
"It was coming down like a raging river," VanNatter says a few days later, backing a black pickup stacked with waterlogged wood out of his driveway. "I've never seen it that bad."
The nearby closed Mountaineer mine used to be owned by Alpha, just like Twilight and Love Branch. But instead of cleaning up the mine after coal production finished there in 2013, Alpha transferred it to Lexington. A state regulator's report in May found that four of the six pumps used to control water levels at the underground mine weren't working and said Lexington was responsible for water flowing out of one homeowner's well. The high waters inside Mountaineer flow into a connected underground mine owned by another company that overflowed and damaged nearby properties, according to state documents.
VanNatter and 10 of his neighbors sued Lexington and the other company for allowing water to pour out of the ground and damage their homes. "It's sinking my foundation," says VanNatter, 36, who worked for Alpha about a decade ago and has lived in the area his entire life. "If I have to leave here, man, that's gut-wrenching."
Lexington denied in court filings that it is responsible for any flooding or damages. State regulators said in an email that the company didn't follow its pumping plan but that the other coal company is more responsible for the impact on homes.
Coal mines can also worsen flooding during intense storms, with more water flowing through areas with surface mines compared with unmined areas, according to a 2011 study by the Environmental Protection Agency. And scientists predict that climate change will bring torrential rains more often.
After floods struck Eastern Kentucky and killed about 40 people in July and August, some residents of Lost Creek sued the coal company that mines the land above their town for making the flooding and damage worse. Old coal mines present a looming and potentially expensive disaster for coal country — and for taxpayers who could be on the hook.
Meanwhile, Alpha's share price has gone up more than 700% since it exited bankruptcy in 2016. The executives who guided the company through bankruptcy, a corporate split, a re-merger, and a name change to Alpha Metallurgical Resources have been handsomely rewarded. Kevin Crutchfield, CEO from 2009 to 2019, earned at least $72 million in those years. President Andy Eidson, set to take over as CEO, has made at least $16 million since he joined Alpha a decade ago.
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