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With Russian soldiers pushed out of parts of the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian investigators have been overwhelmed with accounts of detentions, torture and missing relatives, as well as collaboration and property theft.
Twice, she said, they ransacked her cottage in a village outside the town of Balakliya, and when they did eventually detain her months later, they tortured her repeatedly under interrogation, using electric shocks and threats of rape.
The recapturing by Ukrainian fighters of much of the Kharkiv region a month ago is now revealing what life was like for thousands of people living under Russian military occupation from the early days of the war. For many there were periods of calm, but almost no food or public services. For those like Mariya, accused of sympathizing with or helping the Ukrainians, it was pure hell.
“In a word, it was horror,” Mariya said. “I thought I would not come out alive.”
A police car is seen outside Donald Trump's residence in Mar-A-Lago, Florida, Aug. 8. (photo: Giorgio Viera/AFP)
ALSO SEE: Mar-a-Lago Classified Papers Held US Secrets About Iran and China
The filing only addresses a dispute over 15 documents but it demonstrates the potential legal slog ahead given there are roughly 22,000 total to review.
Special master Raymond Dearie is reviewing Trump’s claims of executive privilege over the documents, which were seized from the former President’s Florida home in August.
Six of the documents described by DOJ are clemency requests Trump received while he was President. Two documents relate to immigration and border control laws, presidential powers and initiatives, prosecutors said.
One document is a “printed e-mail message from a person at one of the military academies addressed to the President in his official capacity about the academy’s sports program and its relationship to martial spirit. The message relates at a minimum to the ‘ceremonial duties of the President’ if not to his Commander-in-Chief powers,” the filing says.
Trump’s team has categorized those as personal records, while the federal government says they are presidential records – not Trump’s to keep, and not able to be protected by Trump with any executive privilege claim.
Dearie previously said in a phone call with the parties he was having trouble squaring how Trump could claim some documents were both personal and protected by executive privilege. Four records are in that category among Thursday’s list of 15.
Trump’s attorneys replied, saying that the Justice Department’s account of the 15 documents are “not fully accurate” and that they plan to file a full response Monday. However, Dearie has since instructed the Trump team that the deadline for such a filing is Friday.
Trump’s team and the Justice Department will continue to work through much of the 22,000 records over the coming month, and Dearie is set to make determinations by mid-December.
Workers at Amazon's West Coast Air Freight Fulfillment Center in San Bernardino, California, protest outside the facility on October 14, 2022. (photo: Frederic J. Brown/Getty)
Last week workers at four different Amazon warehouse across the US walked out to protest the company’s low pay and brutal working conditions. The actions were timed to coincide with Amazon’s Prime Day promotional sales rush.
And then there are the workers. It takes more than a million people, most of them low-paid and grindingly exploited, to pick, sort, unload, ship, and deliver packages to customers’ doors within days of an order.
Last week workers took aim at disrupting this symphony of human capital with walkouts at four distinct warehouse types in the company’s logistics chain — a cross-dock near Chicago, a delivery station and a fulfillment center near Atlanta, and in Southern California, one of the company’s large air hubs.
The walkouts weren’t centrally coordinated. But they were all timed to coincide with the company’s Prime Day promotional sales rush, which ran October 10 to 12.
Across these facilities, workers say they’re overworked and underpaid, squeezed by rising inflation and terrible conditions.
Think of each strike as a small test. Speed is Amazon’s brand, and its massive warehouse and logistics chain is designed to move goods fast. Any interruption or delay gives workers leverage.
Links On the Chain
“How do you get a handmade item delivered from a small business in rural Connecticut to a customer in Los Angeles?” asked an Amazon press release last year, promoting the new air hub in San Bernardino, California. “In a straight line across the sky, thanks to Amazon Air and its thousands of incredible employees.”
Those incredible employees are now part of a group called Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, supported by the Teamsters and the Warehouse Worker Resource Center.
A hundred day and night shift workers at the air hub, one of more than a dozen hubs nationally, walked out October 14 after the company failed to meet their demands to boost pay to $22 hourly, improve health and safety standards in sweltering hot working conditions, and put an end to retaliation.
Meanwhile in Joliet, near Chicago, fifty workers at the cross-dock facility MDW2 had walked off the job October 11, demanding stronger health and safety policies and a wage hike to $25 an hour.
A cross-dock facility is a central hub where products are sorted and distributed to regional fulfillment centers without being racked or stored. The one in Joliet employs between one thousand and two thousand workers, depending on seasonal hiring peaks.
The next day, a dozen workers walked out at ATL2, a fulfillment center in Stone Mountain, Georgia, to protest unfair labor practice violations, unsafe working conditions, and low pay. Fulfillment centers are where customers’ orders are stored, picked, packed, and shipped.
And at the delivery station DGE9 in Buford, Georgia, workers walked out October 11 and 12 — a dozen people the first day, two dozen the next — protesting Amazon’s failure to meet the demands they had made in a summer petition: twenty-four hours of paid time off and an $18 base wage.
Delivery stations are the final stop in the company’s logistics chain. They are essential to Amazon’s promise of speedy same-day to two-day delivery.
Rainbows Dimmed
Alfonso Rodriguez remembers feeling welcomed when he started at the San Bernardino air hub in June 2021, walking into a workplace adorned with rainbows for LGBTQ Pride Month. But the rainbows soon dimmed as he got to know the working conditions.
It was a sweltering summer; workers recorded 96-degree heat inside cargo planes and tractor trailers, while temperatures on the tarmac shot up to 110.
Rodriguez is a learning ambassador, charged with training new hires. But “by November I no longer wanted to train people,” he said, because it was too painful to watch his trainees buckle under the workload and suffer without water breaks during a record heat wave.
Around the Christmas holidays, Amazon announced with little notice that the warehouse would be closed for two days, unexpectedly cutting workers’ take-home pay. A petition against the closure kicked off the air hub’s first organizing campaign.
Anna Ortega was on track to become a process assistant, a role adjacent to management, when a coworker approached her to sign the petition. She declined.
“I was too scared to sign up at first. I thought they were gonna get fired,” she said. “None of them got fired. And they actually got Amazon to implement a national policy change [giving workers advance notice of closures].”
She joined her coworkers in their next collective action, presenting a petition for a $5 wage increase. Soon she began wondering, “Hey, what if we unionize?”
“Just Be Thankful”
Workers started building an organizing committee. They kept marching on the boss. In July they delivered an eight-hundred-signature petition.
Management went on the offensive, bringing in anti-union consultants. In August more than 150 workers walked off the job, according to the Washington Post. (Amazon said it was only 74.)
After the walkout, Amazon raised wages by 90 cents an hour on weekday night shifts and 85 cents on weekend nights. But workers had demanded $5. And now they were facing retaliation, surveillance, and another heat wave.
Managers also started sending workers up on ladders into crossbelt conveyors to dislodge fallen packages, a job previously done by trained maintenance technicians.
“They were sending us up to these tight, crammed spaces,” Ortega said. “It’s hot. There’s no ventilation. It’s dark. The whole time that you’re in there you have to crab-walk. After every other step, there’s a beam directly above your head. We would come out dripping in sweat, panting.”
The warehouse feels dark now, Rodriguez says, with union busters skulking in the shadows — far from the “rainbow environment” that once appealed to him.
“What Amazon is showing is predator-like behavior,” he said:
They follow a plan that has worked: come to these poor communities where people are told that they should just be thankful, not ask for more.
I’ve only been there a year, and that’s how long it took to figure out that this plan does not work out for the worker. It only works out for Amazon.
A Critical Node
Air hub workers are strategically placed at a critical node in Amazon’s distribution network.
Amazon is the largest employer in Southern California and has more than forty facilities in the state, according to the consulting firm MWPVL International.
Each day, Amazon operates fourteen flights in and out of the sprawling air hub known as KSBD. It’s part of the company’s air freight division, where Amazon-branded planes and trucks transport packages to warehouses across the country. Amazon Air operates at forty-two airports, within one hundred miles of 70 percent of the US population.
The company is heavily investing in its business-to-consumer delivery, entering the third-party shipping sector. In April it rolled out “Buy with Amazon,” which allows consumers to use their Prime memberships when selecting shipping options even if they’re buying stuff on a different platform than Amazon.com.
In response to a slowdown in e-commerce, which has left the company with excess capacity, Amazon is both freezing hiring and abandoning warehouse expansions. However, in the Inland Empire it faces a different sort of challenge.
According to a leaked internal research report, Amazon has burned through its workforce in the Inland Empire so fast that it fears it will run out of workers by the end of 2022.
“Amazon has hired everybody,” said Rodriguez. “I’m thirty-five, but I consider myself one of the older people. I call myself an OG, an old gay.”
Measly Raises
In September Amazon announced it would be spending $1 billion to boost worker pay nationwide.
“What that looked like for our warehouse, we got a 50 cent raise,” said Arturo Adame, who works at the delivery station in Buford, Georgia. “We were asking for $3. During the peak season, they give us a $3 bonus — so what we were asking was, let’s make that bonus permanent.”
“I didn’t even get a quarter to put in the vending machine” is how Theometra Robinson, at the Stone Mountain fulfillment center, described the raise.
Amazon raked in a net income of $33.6 billion last year, on revenues of $469.8 billion. CEO Andy Jassy earned $212.7 million.
While the typical CEO in this country got an obscene 399 times as much as the typical worker last year, Jassy earned 6,474 times the median Amazon worker’s salary.
“Light Bulb Went Off”
After the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won its historic victory at a Staten Island fulfillment center, Robinson reached out to Teamsters Local 728 in Lakewood, Georgia.
“I knew that they represented UPS workers,” she said. “They were the top union in the country. That’s bargaining power for us.”
Robinson had started at ATL2 in May 2021. She rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a process assistant within months. Things were on the upswing until she got a written warning after cursing out a worker who had physically assaulted her.
Soon after, Amazon rescinded her promotion and refused to transfer her from a department she characterized as a hostile work environment. She fell into a bout of depression that lasted until ALU’s win lifted her spirits.
“A light bulb went off,” she said. “They didn’t know I had unionized before.” Robinson and other GardaWorld Security drivers had won a union drive in 2010 with the Security, Police and Fire Professionals.
Lone-Wolf Campaign
She went to a Teamsters training in Georgia on unionizing Amazon, but she felt its emphasis was misplaced on organizing contract workers who drive Amazon-branded vans.
“If you try to unionize them, Amazon will cancel these people’s contracts,” she argued. “You have to unionize the warehouses and negotiate some kind of terms and conditions for these drivers, because you’re going to lose on that other end.”
The Teamsters advised her to focus on list-building, identifying leaders for a committee, and building a base of support before going public with a campaign. “They don’t want you to be exposed as one of the organizers. They want you to do everything covert,” she said.
She disagreed with that strategy, too. “Look, this facility is too big to be covert,” she told them:
This is a building of four thousand people. I can’t throw a rock and hit three people I know. You’re in a station isolated all day. You can barely walk around and go pee.
In order for me to get what you are asking me, I need to be out there.
Robinson started a lone-wolf campaign. Standing outside the facility handing out flyers was a way to plant a flag and draw workers toward her. But the union busting was swift. Managers started targeting workers who seemed sympathetic.
Meanwhile Amazon had set more strenuous rules — preventing water breaks, dinging workers for missed productivity targets and “time off task.” Workers were fed up.
Their first walkout was September 14, after a worker passed out from heat exhaustion. The second was October 11.
A Clandestine Approach
Adame and his striking coworkers from the delivery center in nearby Buford piled into a van to meet Robinson and her coworkers as they walked out during Prime Week. “We’re in the same fight,” he said. “We walked out; you walked out. Let’s celebrate together.”
However, Adame says they are trying different strategies. “I would attribute the difference to where we work,” he said:
Theometra’s facility is a fulfillment center employing thousands of workers. They can be a bit more direct because it’s harder to communicate with other workers.
They are taking an aggressive style to organizing and announcing their walkout plans, which is probably the only way to organize a fulfillment center.
I trust that they know what they are doing. They work there.
By contrast, the workers at DGE9 are keeping things as clandestine as possible. “At the delivery station, we have a lot of leverage,” Adame said. “So we’re being diligent about building the committee, so we can delay freight and affect Amazon’s bottom line.”
Influenced by the collective Amazonians United, which has chapters across the United States and Canada, the Buford workers have adopted a solidarity union model. That means they’re not pursuing legal union recognition anytime soon. Instead, their focus is on workplace collective action.
“Knowing the terror campaign that Amazon would unleash if you certify an election — the union busting, the captive-audience meetings — having a shop floor solidarity union is one way” to overcome these hurdles to a traditional strategy, Adame said.
“We would love to unionize Amazon formally. We just know it’s going to be a tough battle. And we’re committed to setting the stage, so one day we can make that happen.”
He appreciates Amazonians United for its “strategic vision,” which prioritizes delivery stations as a critical link in the supply chain.
“Since delivery stations are part of the last mile and only employ about one hundred employees,” he said, “they are a very good place to organize and bring coworkers together and affect the company’s bottom line and delay freight. That’s the only way to get the company’s attention and be taken seriously.”
“You Can’t Even Breathe”
The Amazon workers organizing at the cross-dock facility MDW2 in Joliet, Illinois, are getting support from the United Electrical Workers–backed worker center Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ).
They have filed fifty Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints to date and collected seven hundred signatures on their petition.
Tennetta Baker has worked at Amazon for six years; before this she was a certified nursing assistant. At first she liked the pay bumps Amazon would give out for attendance and meeting productivity quotas.
But despite her contributions (“I’ve trained over one thousand people easily,” she says) the raises stopped. This is a policy intended to get rid of long-term employees, to prevent what founder Jeff Bezos has characterized as “a march to mediocrity.”
This year Baker got a sixty-cent bump to $20.90. Her co-pays and premiums have been increasing too. And besides the money, “it’s the safety issues, the racial slurs,” she said, “the nitpicking supervisors do, the changes on a whim.”
MDW2 workers walked out in May to protest what WWJ called “racist death threats” scrawled on bathroom walls.
“We still see masks a lot,” said another worker, Cesar Escutia:
I thought it was people concerned with COVID and the flu, but it was actually people with asthma who are concerned about the dust in the air. There’s a lot of issues you can face at work, but not being able to breathe?
You go through life, and you work these types of jobs just because you want to make a wage and provide so many products that people need — and you can’t even do it with the dignity of knowing that you’re going to be able to breathe.
He teared up as he spoke. “It’s the worst place I’ve worked,” he said.
Escutia works nights. “You go in, you work ten hours, you go home, you get to sleep,” he said. “You don’t get much more opportunity to do anything else. And before you know it you’re back to work the next day. At no point can you really have meaningful conversations or meaningful rest.”
Sometimes the grueling conditions zap his confidence that winning is even possible. “I have my doubts about this fight that we’re partaking in,” he said. What if “it’s all in vain, if we can’t get meaningful change for ourselves, even after all the struggle?
“But I see things like today, and I get a lot of hope.”
A worker tests voting equipment in Miami, Florida, 19 October 2022. (photo: Cristóbal Herrera/EPA)
Case is one of the 19 voter fraud prosecutions, and involves man who says he registered to vote in 2020 without knowing he was ineligible
The case on Friday involved Robert Lee Wood, a 56-year-old Miami man who registered to vote in 2020 and voted in the presidential election last year. State prosecutors indicted Wood, who is Black, saying he registered and voted knowing he was ineligible. He was ineligible because he was convicted in 1991, but Wood said he did not know that. He registered in 2020 when he was approached by a canvasser and was sent a voter registration card by the state.
Judge Milton Hirsch dismissed the case on Friday. Wood was charged with two third degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The prosecutions, all of which involve people with prior felony convictions, have come under intense scrutiny. Several of those charged have said they did not know they couldn’t vote and were not informed of their ineligibility until after they voted.
Hirsch dismissed the case because he said statewide prosecutors had overstepped their authority in bringing charges against Wood.
In a request to dismiss the case, Wood’s attorney argued that the statewide prosecutor’s office, which is handling all 19 cases, didn’t have the authority to handle the case. In Florida, the statewide prosecutor is authorized to handle only cases that involve criminal conduct in two or more of the state’s judicial circuits. But Wood registered and voted in a single place, Miami.
Prosecutors argued that Wood committed a multi-jurisdictional criminal act. Even though he registered and voted in Miami, his registration was transmitted to the state capitol, Tallahassee, for review. The criminal act, the state argued, was therefore committed in two jurisdictions. In its argument, the statewide prosecutors argued they had authority to prosecute election crimes anywhere in Florida.
Hirsch disagreed, saying “the crime, if there was one, occurred exclusively in Miami.”
“Robert Lee Wood’s misconduct, if misconduct it was, consisted in registering to vote, and voting, in his county of residence. Yes, his voter application and his ballot were transported to another Florida jurisdiction. But they were not transported by him, nor by any putatively criminal co-perpetrator,” he wrote in his ruling. “Even assuming that Mr Wood’s passive role in the transmission of his voter application form and completed ballot to Tallahassee is ‘activity’ that can be ascribed to him, it is not his ‘criminal activity’.”
In 2018, Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to people with felonies, except those convicted of murder and sexual offenses. Some of those charged have said they believed the amendment restored their voting rights. The state has yet to provide evidence showing that any of the defendants, all of whom have prior murder or sexual offenses, knew they were exempt from the amendment.
Body camera footage of some of the defendants being arrested in Hillsborough county obtained by the Guardian and the Tampa Bay Times showed their bewilderment as they were put in handcuffs over voter fraud charges.
A spokesperson for Florida attorney general Ashley Moody, a Republican who appoints the statewide prosecutor, said her office would appeal the ruling.
“We believe this was an incorrect analysis of jurisdiction and OSP will appeal,” Nicholas Cox, the statewide prosecutor, said in a statement.
“Given that elections violations of this nature impact all Florida voters, elections officials, state government, and the integrity of our republic, we continue to view the Florida Office of Statewide Prosecution as the appropriate agency to prosecute these crimes,” Bryan Griffin, a DeSantis spokesman, said in a statement. “The state will continue to enforce the law and ensure that murderers and rapists who are not permitted to vote do not unlawfully do so. Florida will not be a state in which elections are left vulnerable or cheaters unaccountable.”
Lawyers representing several of the other defendants have filed similar motions in other counties in the state. Friday’s motion is significant because the other attorneys will likely use it to bolster their cases.
“The lawyers that are working with these 20 defendants, they’re all aware of the motions that were filed in this case and are now aware of the order that was entered,” said Larry Davis, Wood’s attorney. “I believe his decision will carry weight not only in his own circuit but in circuits around the state.”
DeSantis held a press conference in August to announce the charges. Flanked by uniformed law enforcement, the governor described it as the “opening salvo” of a new office dedicated to combatting voter fraud, which is rare.
“They did not go through any process, they did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyways. That is against the law and now they’re gonna pay the price for it.”
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Activists rally in support of DACA, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, June 15, 2022. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
After seeing other interest groups notch wins, they tell the president: It’s our turn.
Nearly two years into the Biden administration, having watched many of their progressive brethren score significant and historic breakthroughs on their respective causes, they’re getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of action on theirs. And a bit jealous too.
In conversations with more than a dozen immigrant advocates, many said they fully recognize the hurdles this White House faces in pushing policy and change through. Among them is a court system that has consistently struck down its efforts to reverse immigration restrictions put in place under Donald Trump.
Still, they argued that President Joe Biden is nowhere close to fulfilling his campaign promises to build a “fair and humane,” modernized immigration system. They believe his administration hasn’t prioritized immigration reform, even shying away from the subject in the run-up to midterms, fearful of how Republicans might spin any action.
Such disappointment is common within immigration advocacy circles, where operatives have toiled for decades on ill-fated attempts to move policy. But this cycle, they say, it stings worse. That’s because they’ve watched as Biden has delivered on promises for so many other interest groups:
Advocates for student debt forgiveness celebrated recently after the White House announced $10,000 of student debt for millions of people and up to $20,000 of debt for low- and middle-income borrowers who previously received a Pell Grant.
Marijuana activists watched in glee as Biden pardoned thousands of people convicted of federal marijuana possession and inched closer to his campaign pledge to decriminalize weed.
Gun safety groups got the first major legislation passed by Congress in nearly three decades signed into law, and they continue to hear the president fight to ban assault weapons.
Climate activists scored the biggest win of all, with the passage of the $370 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act carved out for climate change.
The president did send a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress on his first day in the White House. But progress on the legislative front has been absent since. As Jorge Loweree, managing director of programs and strategy at the American Immigration Council, put it: “That was the end of the story.”
“It wasn’t prioritized by any means,” said Loweree. “And their achievements in terms of administrative changes have also been limited because they’ve been stymied by red states and the courts, and the very complicated politics, particularly in relation to that to the southern border. And they’ve also been stymied by, quite frankly, internal disagreements and missteps of their own.”
The White House is fully aware of the immigration advocacy world’s frustrations. But they argue it should be directed toward Republican lawmakers for refusing to support its immigration legislation and GOP lawmakers and law enforcement officials in the states who have blocked administration steps the administration has taken. The White House also pointed to examples of what officials see as “significant progress” despite these challenges.
“This includes taking thousands of smugglers off the streets, implementing a new regulation to cut asylum processing times down from years to months, strengthening and fortifying protections for Dreamers,” assistant press secretary Abdullah Hasan said in a statement. Hasan highlighted this summer’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, where Biden and 20 other world leaders unveiled a plan to manage migration and expand legal pathways for migrants, and noted the administration’s efforts to reunify families separated during the Trump administration.
While advocates recognized such efforts, they say there is a gulf between the administration’s stated sense of urgency and the slowness with which it moves in crafting immigration policy.
“The administration generally means well, but this issue is not in their top tier,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals. “And it needs to be.”
Much of the bottleneck for the White House — and, in turn, the source of some of the tension over immigration priorities — revolves around the uncertain status of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Since its 2012 inception, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to receive work permits and deportation relief. Only current DACA recipients will remain temporarily protected under a new Biden administration rule set to take effect on Oct. 31, and supporters warn that the program is likely headed to the Supreme Court, where the conservative bench seems likely to rule it illegal.
Immigrant advocates in Congress are demanding with greater urgency that the Biden administration work to pass permanent protection for DACA recipients, including a pathway to citizenship. In a press call last week, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said the president needs to “make clear that passing immigration legislation is a priority” before the end of the year.
But the congressional math isn’t there and is likely to worsen. The perennial DREAM Act, which would provide legal status to DACA recipients and other so-called Dreamers, was passed by the House last year but remains at a standstill in the Senate because there aren’t the 10 Republican votes needed to get it across the finish line. Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who originally introduced the bill, said on the DACA press call he can currently count only on four or five Republican votes.
That’s where immigration supporters say Biden must come in. They argue that a president who prides himself as a legislative bridge-builder — and who has claimed major bipartisan wins for other interest groups — owes immigrant advocates the same.
“It’s clear that the ball is in President Biden’s hands,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream. “He needs to say that it’s his number one priority coming out of this Congress at the end of this year. He needs to say that clearly, publicly and many times. I think that he can use his bipartisan experience to bring Republicans to the negotiating table.”
The immigration community is not the only element of the broader Democratic coalition that feels left wanting after Biden’s first two years in office. Voting rights and police reform advocates also saw little progress on their causes, if not major setbacks. Women’s issue groups watched as some of their priorities were scrapped from Biden’s domestic agenda and as the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights.
But immigrant advocates note that some of their demands aren’t contingent on Congress or the courts, which makes it all the more exasperating as to why the administration has failed to deliver.
Some told POLITICO they simply wanted to see the administration remedy the harm caused by the Trump administration’s family separation policies. Others want to see follow-up on early proposals to protect immigrant workers in labor disputes.
The administration further angered the community last week when it announced plans to use the Trump-era pandemic policy, Title 42, to expel Venezuelan migrants crossing the border illegally as part of its new humanitarian parole program for them. Advocates decried the expansion of Title 42, which the Justice Department is fighting in court, as a continuation of the Trump “playbook.”
Still, Angela Kelley, chief adviser for policy and partnerships at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, defended the administration for its approach, which she said is centered around durability.
“Rather than shortcutting a process and trying to write a memo, there’s more elbow grease going into drafting a regulation. And I think that that’s really trying to instill good law and policy that won’t become just like at the whim of the next administration,” said Kelley, who served as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ senior counselor on immigration until May. “But that’s just going to take longer, and there’s a lot of pent up demand … because there is a direct bearing on communities and individual lives.”
Kelley is hopeful the White House will take advantage of the legislative window she and others foresee coming during the lame duck session following the midterms. While she warned that the administration’s push might be quiet given the polarization around immigration policy, others said the time for private back channels had passed. Biden, they argued, needed simply to lean in more forcefully.
“This is a moment where he needs to use his bully pulpit but also his political capital to make sure that he’s delivering for immigrant youth who have been here since they were children,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “There is no other time. Let’s not wait until the Supreme Court rules.”
Citizens flooded the streets across Haiti in rejection of President Ariel Henry's request for international military assistance, demanding that foreign powers stop interfering in Haiti. (photo: Radyo Rezistans/Facebook)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the crisis in Haiti, where protesters continue to demand the resignation of the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ariel Henry and against the deployment of international troops to Haiti amidst a growing humanitarian crisis. A blockade of a key port in Port-au-Prince, the capital, by gangs has led to a critical shortage of fuel, food and water for millions of people.
Meanwhile, Haiti is fighting a new outbreak of cholera. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for a, quote, “armed action” to reopen the port.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: It’s an absolutely nightmarish situation for the population of Haiti, especially Port-au-Prince. … I believe that we need not only to strengthen the police, strengthening it with training, with equipment, with a number of other measures, but that in the present circumstances we need an armed action to release the port and to allow for a humanitarian corridor to be established.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield pushed for the U.N. Security Council to authorize a non-U.N. international security mission to go to Haiti.
LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: The second resolution we’re working on would authorize a non-U.N. international security assistance mission to help improve the security situation and enable the flow of desperately needed humanitarian aid.
AMY GOODMAN: But in the streets of Haiti, many protesters have condemned the United States for pushing to intervene again in Haiti. Protesters are also demanding the resignation of Ariel Henry, who has ruled since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse on July 7, 2021. This is former Haitian senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean-Charles.
MOÏSE JEAN-CHARLES: [translated] Freedom. We are not in the states of the United States. We are not provinces of the United States. We are a country. We are a republic. They cannot give us orders. This time, we do not need them. If Ariel Henry does not resign and the bank officials don’t change their minds, we will make a revolution in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Guerline Jozef. She is co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, which advocates for humanitarian assistance to Haitians and other Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. Today she’s joining us from Mexico City, where she’s looking into the impacts of the Title 42 pandemic, Trump-era policy that’s been used to block at least 2 million migrants, including tens of thousands of Haitians, from applying for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Biden administration recently expanded Title 42 to begin expelling Venezuelan nationals.
Guerline Jozef, welcome back to Democracy Now! Before we move to what’s happening at the border, let’s talk about what’s happening in Haiti right now. You have the reports that chaos is engulfing the country, that it’s become so total, the social fabric is so torn, that the country is on the verge of collapse. And then you have the U.N. secretary-general calling for military action. Can you respond to the protests and the response?
GUERLINE JOZEF: Good morning, Amy. Thank you so much for having us.
What we are seeing in Haiti right now is extremely painful as a Haitian woman, as a Haitian American woman, to see how the country has been dipping into this abyss. And we have been in communications with civil societies in Haiti to understand what is needed on the ground. And they are telling us they need a Haitian-led solution in order for the country to get out of where we are right now — as you mentioned, Amy, rampant violence, gang violence, political turmoil, assassination of the president still not answered.
And we are seeing people really protesting on the street for the right to sovereign — a solution to the issues that are happening. And they are saying no to an invasion, no to armed invasion from the international community, because every time there is the so-called help invasion, that people go to Haiti, results in chaos. You also mentioned the cholera pandemic that is in the rise right now. And that itself is a result of the U.N. being in Haiti after the earthquake. So, we are seeing and hearing, and we are taking the time to understand what Haiti needs right now in how we move forward.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Guerline Jozef, I wanted to ask you — we keep hearing about this gang violence that is rampant throughout Haiti. But there are some Haitians in the U.S., as well as other radicals and socialists here in this country, who say that all these gangs are not alike, that the — for instance, that the FRG9, the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family, led by Jimmy Chérizier, are much more political, and they’re the ones that are dealing with this blockade of the port, whereas other gangs, like the GPEP, are actually part of — work with the Ariel Henry government and the police, and the United States seems to be more focused on FRG9. Could you talk about whether there are differences between these gangs? And what’s your sense of how the narrative is being shaped here in the U.S.?
GUERLINE JOZEF: Absolutely. One thing I want to clarify is the fact that this gang pandemic, this gang phenomenon, is not native to Haiti. It’s imported to Haiti. We are not used to this type of violence when it comes to gangs. This is a new system that is being put in place, or that has been put in place, to destabilize the country. I do not know who is supporting which gang. I do not know which activities are being supported either by outside sources or people within the government.
But what we are seeing right now is that people are fearful. We are seeing entire neighborhoods being displaced, in Martissant, in Croix-des-Bouquets, in Pétion-Ville, where we never had any violence before, that we are seeing all places in the country dealing with gang violence. And again, it is imperative that we understand the narrative that’s being shared, is that Haiti has never had to deal with this level of gang violence. This is new. This is backed by many different other outside forces.
And we must understand that we have to come to a resolve where we rid the country of violence, so people don’t have to flee. Right now we are seeing people fleeing by boat, either going to Puerto Rico, to the Bahamas, to Miami. And they are dying on the way here. We are seeing people fleeing from Haiti, making their way to the border in Mexico, because they cannot be at home. We are seeing the political turmoil, the gang violence, that are being financed or supported by whomever, that are creating a space where people cannot survive.
That is why when we speak to civil societies in Haiti, we understand that in order for us to move forward, there must be sustainability. There must be proper school. There must be proper hospital. There must be — the agriculture needs to be revived, in order for people to be able to be safe at home and not have to flee.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk about the Montana Accords, what they are, and the group that developed them following the assassination of Haiti’s former president in 2021?
GUERLINE JOZEF: I am not an expert of the Montana Accord, but what we understand is that over 500 groups, civil societies, political groups, have come together to come up with a solution that is led by Haitians to be able to find a way moving forward. What we understand from the Montana Accord, it is the only alternative we have right now to really getting ourselves out of the political turmoil, possibly having a safe transition where then we can move to a better space in Haiti. So, again, I am not an expert in the Montana Accord, but from understanding and speaking with many different groups and people who were involved, it seems to be a good alternative in order to move forward.
But what we are seeing is that there’s no real engagement between the Montana Accord parties, the international communities, people who wants to support Haiti and wants to be able to get a way out of the issues we are dealing right now. So we are calling on the international community, on the U.S. and Canada, to not side with one — with the political people in power, but to make sure that they are including the civil societies, the people of Haiti, who are able to take their future in hand and see how we can work together. At this point, we believe that Haiti needs support. Haiti needs to be stabilized. Haiti needs to have a sustainable ecosystem, so that people can lift, people can prosper — not just survive, but thrive.
Widespread drought that dried up large parts of Europe, the United States and China this past summer was made 20 times more likely by climate change, experts say. (photo: Getty)
Riverbeds that used to be covered in ample water are now dehydrated by drought.
Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that the 22-year megadrought affecting the West would not only intensify but also move eastward.
That prediction appears to be coming into fruition, with about 82% of the continental U.S. currently showing conditions between abnormally dry and exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
And while the U.S. and North America continue to witness water levels dropping in crucial rivers, lakes and reservoirs, a mixture of climate change and poor water management policies are causing similar events all over the world, experts told ABC News.
"Rivers all over the world are running really low," especially the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, as well as significant bodies of water in countries like Italy, Romania, France and China, Jonathan Deason, professor of the Environmental and Energy Management Program at George Washington University.
The experts said that a two-pronged approach that includes climate change mitigation and better water management policies will be crucial as bodies of water continue to dry up. But so much damage has already been done, that even drastic improvements or reductions in emissions will not immediately impact reducing the stress on water levels, they said.
Here are some recent examples of bodies of water drying up in North America:
Shipwreck, human remains found in the Mississippi River
Decreasing water levels along the Mississippi River, one of the most important trade routes in the country, have been causing ripple effects worldwide.
Earlier this month, barges with shipping containers began idling along the sandbars of the river that previously contained ample water.
Waters along the Mississippi have receded so much that a ferry that likely sunk in the late 1800s or early 1900s was discovered near Baton Rouge, earlier this month, and possible human remains were located by a resident in Coahoma County, Missouri, on Saturday.
Much of the region surrounding the Mississippi River is experiencing conditions between abnormally dry and severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The Mississippi River at Memphis, Tennessee, hit its lowest level in recorded history on Monday, with several other gauges at risk to break records as well.
Supply chain delays for goods like grains, cement and fuel, which travel through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, could be a consequence of a dried-up Mississippi, experts say.
"What happens is, commercial vessels have trouble, have obstacles popping up," Deason said. "Waters used to be so deep, it didn't make a difference for navigation."
Ripple effects will include inflation and the prices of food and goods increasing, Deason added.
The water levels will likely get worse, and recede even more, before they begin to rise again, Jonathan Remo, an associate professor at Southern Illinois University's School of Earth Systems and Sustainability, told ABC News last week.
Great Salt Lake continues to shrink
The Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the world and largest terminal lake in the Western Hemisphere -- is continuing to lose its volume at alarming rates.
By 2017, the lake had lost half of its water since the first settler arrived in 1847, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience. It is now one-third of its original capacity and has reached unsustainable levels, researchers told PBS.
The loss of water in the lake, which is now at its lowest levels ever, is already causing a dangerous ecological ripple effect throughout Utah, and it will likely get worse, scientists told ABC News in July. More than 800 square miles of river have been exposed as a result of the dry-up.
"I don't know how much time we have," Joel Ferry, the director of Utah's Department of Natural Resources, told ABC News.
While most of the decline is attributed to development in the region, resulting in large population increases, climate change and drought are to blame as well, according to researchers.
Animals and plants near the lake are already bearing the burden of the dry-up, Kyle Stone, a wildlife biologist for the state of Utah, told ABC News. The salinity in the water is increasing as water levels drop, killing algae, a source for brine shrimp, which serves as food for more than 10 million birds that stop at the lake during their migration patterns, Stone said.
In addition, if the lake were to dry out, dust storms would be a great concern due to the decades of heavy metals and toxic substances that remain trapped in the sediment, scientists said.
Tens of thousands of dead salmon wash up in Canada
Researchers in British Columbia happened upon a disturbing sight when monitoring salmon populations in the Neekus River in the Heiltsuk territory amid the spawning season earlier this month.
Once the scientists got there, they discovered about 65,000 dead pink salmon on the banks of the dried-up creek instead. The smell was so bad that it was burning the researchers' noses and eyes, forcing them to cover their faces, Allison Dennert, an ecologist at the Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, told the BBC.
"It was the worst mass mortality of salmon, pre-spawn salmon, that I've ever seen," Dennert said.
Little rain has fallen in the region, which has been experiencing high temperatures in recent months-- a continuation of an atmospheric ridge that has been plaguing the Pacific Northwest with record-breaking temperatures.
The large school of fish may have been fooled by a single rain shower that coincided with high tide, making their way upstream in an attempt to spawn for the season, the researchers said.
The tens of thousands of fish eventually sucked up all of the oxygen in the low water levels of the creek. Once they were rendered immobile and began to die off, the ammonia left in the water exacerbated the mass death event.
More than 70% of the salmon had not had the opportunity to spawn before water levels in the creek dropped, Dennert tweeted on Oct. 4.
"I would say it's pretty safe to say this is a consequence of climate change," Dennert said.
Lack of snow melt to replenish the Platt River
Stunning images out of Nebraska shed light into the harsh reality of the consequences of diminishing amounts of snow pack.
The Platte River in central Nebraska, which is fed by snow melt from the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming and Colorado that feed into Lake McConaughy, has not had a chance to replenish as less and less snow falls over the winter.
Photos of a portion of Interstate 90 near Kearney, Nebraska, show a completely dehydrated river bed under a bridge that was previously filled with river water.
More than a third of the Pratte River is in extreme or worse conditions, with precipitation outlooks for the fall forecast to be dry, the Drought Center tweeted on Monday.
Irrigation has depleted most of the reservoirs in the northeast and southwest Nebraska, which are both in extreme drought, KLKN, the ABC affiliate in Lincoln, Nebraska, reported.
Widespread areas around the state have been "quite dry and quite warm" since early July, causing water demand and usage for crops to increase dramatically, Brian Fuchs, climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center, told KLKN.
While it is not unusual for the river to go dry during the irrigation season, experts are monitoring the river downstream of Columbus as an indicator of the overall health of the river, Jason Farnsworth, executive director of the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program, told KLKN.
"If down below the Loup River, you have no flow, that’s sort of a really big deal," Farnsworth said.
Supplies of drinking water continue to dwindle in the West
As the megadrought in the West persists, the reservoirs providing water to households and the vast agriculture industry are getting dangerously low.
Water supplies along the Colorado River and the two largest reservoirs in the country that it supplies -- Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- are continuing to recede.
Further west, reservoirs in California as drying up as well, Pablo Ortiz, climate and waters scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News.
Lake Oroville and Lake Shasta, the two biggest reservoirs in the state, are barely above 30% capacity, and every major reservoir in California except for one is below the historical average, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
In addition, more than 60% of monitored groundwater wells in California are below normal conditions, and more than 21% are currently experiencing historically low levels, Ortiz said. Workers who are drilling into groundwater wells have told Ortiz that groundwater levels in some regions have dropped up to 10 feet, Ortiz said.
"This impacts hundreds of communities that depend on groundwater as their primary source of drinking water," as well as the agriculture industry, he said.
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