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His Trump-style, pugilistic approach was rewarded by Florida voters who re-elected him by a 19 percentage-points. “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die” was DeSantis’s sinister declaration in his inauguration speech, weaponizing ”woke” to denounce any disliked policy from climate change to transgender rights, critical-race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement. He successfully appealed to the bigotries of the state’s aging population, who were sadly bamboozled with racist culture war stunts like shipping legal migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. They voted for a Trump poseur who performs cruelty for their enjoyment, but wants to cut off Social Security and steal their nest eggs from under them.
As governor, DeSantis has failed to expand Medicaid, leaving hundreds of thousands of Floridians without health insurance. As a three-term congressman, DeSantis was a fierce opponent not just of the Affordable Care Act, but Social Security and Medicare. He voted to strip a quarter trillion dollars from programs that allow retired Americans to survive. Like most other Republicans in 2017, he voted to cut taxes on corporations, high-earners, and wealthy heirs. As President, he likely would slash what’s left of the social safety net and use the proceeds to help the rich stay rich.
Single-minded about using the blunt-force gears of state to troll “the libs,” DeSantis’s anti-education crusade is doubly authoritarian – most obviously in its use of state power to suppress ideas and information, but also in its more subtle assumption that teaching is ultimately about imposing doctrines of one sort or another. As if he’s auditioning for an anchor job, DeSantis is all over Fox News propagandizing the homophobic and racist laws he engineered.
“Governor DeSantis understands culture war as public policy,” barked Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis attack dog. Rufo — a MAGA activist who advised DeSantis policy team on “Stop WOKE” — is essentially a chatbot who spews out an endless stream of culture war nonsense. A mini-DeSantis, he views anything related to addressing racism and diversity as “woke” while denouncing American schools as “hunting grounds” for pedophile teachers and suggesting that “parents have good reason” to worry about “grooming” in public schools.”
Part of the “Stop Woke” agenda pushed by DeSantis and Rufo, the “Individual Freedom” bill bans the teaching of anything that might cause students to feel “guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress.” Yet the “freedom” it peddles is achieved by detaching Black children from knowledge of their own heritage and by “freeing” White children from dangerous feelings of solidarity with maltreated people. What DeSantis calls “psychological distress” is the spark of empathy children and adults feel from learning about the oppression of others. Even worse in the eyes of DeSantis, children might feel a sense of injustice and — inspired by the history of civil rights activists — want to better the world.
The legislation is part of a wave of “educational gag orders” banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” — all designed to chill classroom discussion of race and gender. Violations can trigger disciplinary action against faculty and enormous fines for their universities. But the gravest threat to academic freedom comes from a legal argument Florida has advanced in defense of the “Stop WOKE” Act.
In a brief filed in federal court, Florida’s lawyers contend that faculty at public universities are government employees, in-classroom speech is “government speech,” and the state “has simply chosen to regulate its own speech” with the “Stop WOKE” Act. Calling Florida’s argument “positively dystopian” and noting it would give Florida “unfettered authority to muzzle its professors,” the district court temporarily barred enforcement of the statute. But Florida has appealed, and the ultimate outcome of the case is uncertain.
With the various provisions of the “Stop WOKE” bill, “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and now the rejection of the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American history, Florida leads an unrelenting, country-wide assault on truth and freedom of expression. Following Florida, other states want to suppress disfavored viewpoints in the form of laws that censor the histories and experiences of marginalized groups, especially Black and LGBTQ+ communities.
At least 18 states, for example, have laws or policies that restrict the teaching of race and gender. Typical prohibitions include outlawing “indoctrination” — viewed as teaching the history of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow — and forbidding discussions of gender identity, gender orientation, or critical race theory — the view that systemic racism is ingrained into American law and institutions. Along with promoting homophobia and hatred, this widespread attack on Black perspectives helps fuel the racial divisions that enable white supremacy, which serves to maintain the systemic racism that these laws try to ignore.
More than just “trolling the libs,” these Florida laws have coerced librarians into becoming the reading police. DeSantis has made it clear that he doesn’t want schools to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ people exist. He’s banned the teaching of Black history classes on the grounds that lessons on people like Frederick Douglass or Rosa Parks “have no educational value.” District officials there have launched reviews of the appropriateness of teachers’ books as part of House Bill 1467, the state law mandating that school books be age-appropriate, free from pornography, and “suited to student needs.” With the threat of legal action, Florida’s Duval County Public Schools urged educators to “err on the side of caution” in determining whether a book “is developmentally appropriate for student use.”
Some school districts even closed their libraries until all their books can be vetted to make sure they are in compliance and avoid felony charges. When a teacher raised concerns about such book removals, a school official warned the teacher that violating the state law could lead to third-degree felony charges for distributing “harmful materials” to minors. Students arrived in some Florida public school classrooms this month to find their teachers’ bookshelves wrapped in paper. A Florida teacher was fired last week after posting a video of empty bookshelves that DeSantis called “a fake narrative.” The efforts to conceal titles have stirred outrage from educators and parents, many of whom also shared images of bare wooden shelves or books veiled behind sheets of colored paper.
In his maniacal search for manufactured culture war assaults and new “libs to own,” DeSantis has a bully’s knack for finding easy targets among marginalized groups. He has fired the latest salvo in his educational culture war on New College — a tiny liberal arts school in Sarasota with a large LGBTQ+ population. Inaugurating a plan to remake Florida’s educational system in his image and build his MAGA legitimacy ahead of a likely presidential run, DeSantis wants to fundamentally change the character of New College, which describes itself as “a community of free thinkers.”
DeSantis’s education commissioner has expressed a desire to transform the school into “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the conservative, Christian private college in Michigan that is a feeder school for right-wing politics and has close ties to both DeSantis and Trump. In response to a political assault on their academic freedom, New College students say they feel like they’ve been turned into guinea pigs in a right-wing social experiment.
The governor appointed a hard-right board of trustees that includes DeSantis’ ventriloquist dummy Christopher Rufo, who decried what he called, “gender, grooming, and trans ideology in schools” and bragged on twitter, “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within. Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed.”
The trustees promptly fired the school president and installed the former Republican state House Speaker and former DeSantis education commissioner Richard Corcoran as interim president. Corcoran told a Hillsdale National Leadership Seminar last summer that education was “100% ideological. Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.”
After ousting the college president, DeSantis unveiled higher education policies to weaken faculty tenure protections, eliminate diversity and equity programs, and mandate Western civilization courses. “The core curriculum must be grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization,” said DeSantis. “We don’t want students to go through, at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in Zombie studies.” Eliminating Zombie studies means students would not be able to explore the mysterious, malignant driving force of DeSantis’s brain-dead voters.
Deepening a chill that had already taken hold across Florida’s public schools and universities, the state asked students and faculty to fill out a survey about their political leanings and requested information about resources for transgender students. DeSantis’ mouthpiece Rufo also targeted Florida State University, saying the school was led by a “sprawling bureaucracy dedicated to promoting left-wing narratives” that condemned American society as structurally racist, which FSU business professor Jack Fiorito called “exaggerated rubbish.”
DeSantis attacks education as “indoctrination” to chase the votes of the most reactionary segment of the public. While claiming that the educational system is biased against conservatives, Christians, and white people and that teachers are pushing extreme leftist agendas, DeSantis legislates a system of right-wing indoctrination under the guise of fairness and impartiality. Aside from denouncing elite education, DeSantis — a graduate of Yale and Harvard — bashes the usual Fox News scourges and appeals to the grievance-fueled MAGA crowd. Like Trump, DeSantis harbors grudges and seeks revenge on enemies, real or perceived. In this, he echoes the MAGA mob’s desire to punish and destroy immigrants, non-whites, and “woke” elites. The Trump-averse Republicans rallying to DeSantis are calculating that his synthetic, performative version of Trumpism will serve as an adequate substitute for the MAGA base.
The 2022 midterms hopefully showed that most people are sick of the MAGA clown show, the conspiracy theories, and the hate for its own sake. When voters get a whiff of DeSantis’ boring act that strangely mimics Trump’s gestures like a programmed automaton, they will find him as repulsive as Trump himself. His speech on Monday to the Fraternal Order of Police in a Chicago suburb provoked a fierce flurry of condemnations and criticism from the Illinois Governor and Chicago Mayoral contenders. Embattled incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot got it right in her characterization: “Ron DeSantis has perfected being a bigoted, racist demagogue.”
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Dr. Sarah Villarreal is an OB/GYN who moved from Texas to Seattle in July, after the Supreme Court ended the nationwide right to an abortion. (photo: Eilis O'Neill)
“I was actually the first in my family to graduate high school without a child,” she said.
Dr. Villarreal said that’s what motivated her to become an OB/GYN: giving people access to contraception and reproductive care options that she didn’t even know about as a teenager.
But then Texas started restricting access to abortions.
“I wasn’t really feeling like I could safely practice,” she said, “and I felt like I was losing a lot of the joy that I had in my job previously.”
Since the Supreme Court ended Roe and abortion became illegal or severely restricted in many states, health care providers — especially ones who focus on obstetrics — are deciding what to do next. Some are moving to states like Washington, where they can legally terminate pregnancies. Others are staying put and trying to help their patients get to Washington when they need or want an abortion. In both cases, Washington is playing an increasing role as a destination for both patients and providers.
Villarreal said, not long after Texas banned all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a patient came into the ER. She was pregnant and she had a uterine infection, which can be fatal.
“If left untreated, it could get to that,” Villarreal said. “That’s the whole thing with their laws is like, how long am I supposed to wait? Am I waiting until she’s needing a blood transfusion, or septic to the point where she could have a seizure?”
Villarreal said she knew the patient needed an abortion, but she hesitated.
“Anyone can report you,” she said. “And so it really is a scary situation. It’s this whole thing of what we call ‘C.Y.A.’ — cover your ass. No one wants to practice medicine like that.”
While she was trying to figure out what to do, the patient miscarried, Villarreal said. But she didn’t feel safe in Texas anymore. And it wasn’t just abortion: The state was threatening to restrict gender-affirming care as well.
She decided to move to Seattle.
“I was heartbroken,” she said. “I think the thing that really affected me the most was I was doing a lot of transgender care. And I realized that I left a lot of patients without a willing provider. And that was really, really hard. I really felt like I was abandoning my patients.”
Providers aren't just moving their practices from Texas to Washington. It’s too early to have any data about how many providers are moving to a new state because of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says, anecdotally, it is happening.
Others are staying where they are: some because they support the new laws — others because they want to fight those laws, and refer patients out-of-state for abortions.
That’s what Dr. Caitlin Gustafson has decided to do. She practices family medicine with obstetrics in a small town in Idaho.
“This is my home; these are my patients,” Gustafson said in an interview.
Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, Gustafson provided abortions at a Planned Parenthood and also offered abortions in her day-to-day practice.
When people come to her wanting to terminate a pregnancy, “these are generally people that I do know really well,” Gustafson said. “The majority of abortion patients are already parents. There’s a good chance that I’ve already delivered their previous children or take care of their children.”
Gustafson said, now, instead of providing abortions herself, she sees her primary role as giving patients information: “What their options are, where they can go, have frank conversations about their particular situation,” she said. “It’s more important than ever to be that advocate that patients know is going to stand up for them and the health care that they need.”
Some of her patients have traveled to Washington for abortions.
Back in Seattle, OB/GYN Sarah Villarreal has settled into a townhouse in the Rainier Valley.
She said, at her job here, she feels like she can give her patients more options than she could back in Texas.
“I definitely don’t feel that fear,” she said. “And, just, you feel like you’re doing the right thing for your patients.”
Even so, she’s not sure she wants to stay.
“I was doing a lot of good where I was,” she said. “I feel like here in Seattle, providers like me are a dime a dozen. My patients don’t need me the way that they needed me in Texas.”
So, Villarreal said, she’s not sure when, but she might go back. Texas will always be home for her.
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Portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed Friday night in East Palestine, Ohio, are still on fire at mid-day Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023. (photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP)
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said at a press conference Thursday that 500,000 gallons (1.8 million liters) of the wastewater had been delivered to Deer Park, Texas.
“I know that our community was taken aback by the news just as I was," Hidalgo said. "I also want folks to know there are many things we don’t know that we should know. That doesn’t mean that something is wrong. And I want to stress that point.”
Hidalgo said the county on Wednesday learned of the wastewater transfer from the site of a fiery Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which prompted evacuations when toxic chemicals were burned after being released from five derailed tanker rail cars carrying vinyl choride that were in danger of exploding.
The wastewater has been delivered to Texas Molecular, which injects hazardous waste into the ground for disposal. The company told KHOU-TV it is experienced in managing this type of disposal.
“Our technology safely removes hazardous constituents from the biosphere. We are part of the solution to reduce risk and protect the environment, whether in our local area or other places that need the capabilities we offer to protect the environment,” the company said.
Hidalgo said Texas Molecular informed county officials that it had taken delivery of a half million gallons of firefighting water with the expectation of an additional 1.5 million gallons hauled to the site by about 30 trucks per day.
"It’s a very real problem we were told yesterday the materials were coming only to learn today they’ve been here for a week,” said Hidalgo, who wants more information on precautions taken at the injection well.
The delivery also raises questions about the methods of transport, which she said may include trains, and the possible health impact on workers involved in the transfers and the communities between the Ohio crash site and the disposal area in Deer Park, one of 34 communities in Harris County.
Uncertainties remain even after discussions between the county and officials from the federal Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and other industry and environment experts, Hidalgo said.
“The government officials have readily provided the information they have, but what we’re learning is that they themselves don’t seem to have the full information," she said. "I’m not clear on who has the full picture of what is happening here and that is a problem,"
She noted Harris County has around 10 injection wells capable of receiving hazardous commercial waste, making the area one of the few places where the materials could be disposed. But she said there are similar facilities in Vickery, Ohio, and Romulus, Michigan, that also could handle the wastewater and are located closer to the crash site.
“There may be logistical reasons for all of this. There may be economic reasons. Perhaps Texas Molecular outbid the Michigan facility,” Hidalgo said. “It doesn’t mean there’s something nefarious going on, but we do need to know the answer to this question."
Hidalgo added that she first learned Harris County was the disposal site from a journalist, “not from a regulatory agency, not from the company," which she said was "unacceptable.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told KTRK-TV that Texas Molecular “is authorized to accept and manage a variety of waste streams, including vinyl chloride, as part of their ... hazardous waste permit and underground injection control permit.”
Dr. George Guillen, executive director of the Environmental Institute of Houston, said the chemical is “very, very toxic” but the risk to the public is minimal.
“This injection, in some cases, is usually 4,000 or 5,000 feet down below any kind of drinking water aquifer,” said Guillen, a University of Houston-Clear Lake professor of biology and environmental science.
Guillen and Deer Park resident Tammy Baxter said their greatest concerns are transporting the chemicals more than 1,300 miles (2,090 kilometers) from East Palestine to Deer Park.
“There has to be a closer deep well injection,” Baxter told KTRK. “It’s foolish to put it on the roadway. We have accidents on a regular basis ... It is silly to move it that far.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the derailment site Thursday, has warned the railroad responsible for the derailment, Norfolk Southern, to fulfill its promises to clean up the mess just outside East Palestine and help the town recover.
Buttigieg also has announced a package of reforms intended to improve rail safety while regulators try to strengthen safety rules.
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Pete Reed outside one of his clinics in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. (photo: Cengiz Yar)
A former US Marine, Pete took incredible risks to save lives, including acts of bravery during the battle of Mosul. He leaves behind the organization he built to serve on the frontlines
Based on footage we now have of the incident, his vehicle was hit by a Russian anti-tank missile. He was killed in the blast, and others in his team were severely injured. Reports suggest it was likely a double-tap strike, a technique used frequently by Russia in Syria, where an attack is made to draw in additional support and recovery operations before a second attack is made.
Pete was one of the most selfless people I’ve ever met. You should know a bit about the good he did in this world.
I met him in the spring of 2016 over some drinks in Iraq, where I worked as a photographer. He was loud, a bit goofy, and trying to do some good. What good? He hadn’t quite figured that out yet.
Like a handful of other US veterans during those years, Pete had initially tried linking up with one of the many groups fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I’d often bump into those types around the region: sometimes at a frontline, but more often than not nursing whiskey at some bar. My roommate at the time, Campbell MacDiarmid, took to him quite quickly, and we all became fast friends. Pete got a job at a local clinic and then started a medical training program for Kurdish Peshmerga forces. He felt he had finally found some purpose and was genuinely helping people.
A few months later, the battle for Mosul started. Pete, along with a ragtag group of guys, rolled in alongside the Peshmerga on the first day of the offensive. Campbell joined them and wrote about it. It was a rough start to the offensive, and those early weeks were chaos.
As the Peshmerga’s role in the offensive ended and the Iraqis took over, Pete changed course. He quickly set up an operating medical clinic just a short distance from the frontlines. A few westerners and Iraqis volunteered to help. One of my photographer friends, Alex Potter, who had been a nurse in the US, also decided to join in. Alex and Pete would eventually fell in love. They got married last year.
Pete’s clinic was the only medical point anywhere near the fighting, and that small crew was quickly overwhelmed with casualties. The first time I visited the clinic, I was on the way back from reporting with some colleagues. Within minutes, an Iraqi Humvee sped into the dusty lot carrying mangled bodies on its hood. Pete and his crew went to work without thinking. One of the young boys was pulled off the vehicle already dead, but the other kid was still breathing. Pete worked to stop the bleeding on his shredded leg, rammed an IV in his arm, packed him up and sent him off to a hospital further back. The teenager wouldn’t have lasted the ride without the clinic being there. Looking at Pete, his hands and clothing covered in blood, I remember being really impressed by him. He had literally just saved a boy’s life in that dusty lot.
The fight for the city went on for another nine months, claiming thousands of lives along the way. The numbers vary but independent watch groups estimate between 2,500 and 5,000 civilians were killed in the fighting and over 1,500 Iraqi soldiers. Aid organizations estimate over 138,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed during the battle.
As the battle progressed, Pete’s clinic followed the fighting forward. Always a few blocks behind the frontline, they handled the worst casualties imaginable. People would often die in the time it took to reach one of the aid points 30 to 45 minutes outside the fighting area, so they positioned themselves in a place no one else would go: too close to the fighting for larger aid groups to risk it, but close enough to actually treat the wounded in time.
They were shelled, mortared, shot at and car-bombed, but they stayed on. Over the next nine months, that small clinic would go on to save hundreds of lives, possibly thousands.
Besides the fight to save people and keep themselves safe, Pete’s small group was constantly battling the bureaucracy of war, from the Iraqi permissions needed to operate in the city to the lack of funding to the day-to-day logistics. It was hell.
I’d get to visit with Pete back in Erbil when he’d take breaks from the clinic. Always jovial, still the loudest guy at the table. We’d drink too much and talk a lot. It went on like that for the whole war – rough days and late nights. But when he was working, that man’s purpose shone. I’d often stop by at the end of a reporting trip, stepping down out of a Land Cruiser or Humvee, covered in dust and absolutely exhausted. Pete would saunter over, hand me a cigarette and give me the biggest hug in the world. A hug so big it fit in all the awfulness of the day. It enveloped all the pain and death, and yet made me feel everything would be alright. We’d chat for a bit, and then like clockwork, the bodies would start coming in again. He’d drop his half-finished cigarette on the ground and rush off to help.
In the years after Mosul, Pete continued to grow and build that small NGO he started, now called Global Response Management (GRM). They expanded their operations to Syria, Mexico, Guatemala, Sierra Leone and Yemen, and then eventually this year to Ukraine where he teamed up with GoDocs. He never stopped, always driven to help the most vulnerable in the midst of war.
His wife Alex flew to Ukraine and retrieved his body earlier this month. He was cremated and she flew his ashes back to the US. His family held a ceremony for him this past Wednesday, which you can watch here.
He was so many things to so many people: a savior, a friend, a husband, a boss, an uncle, a brother. I’m so glad I got to know him.
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Investigators stand outside during a moment of silence for the victims of the Buffalo supermarket shooting outside the Tops Friendly Market on May 21, 2022, in Buffalo, New York. (photo: Joshua Bessex/AP)
The report, provided to The Associated Press ahead of its public release Thursday, also found that all extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to right-wing extremism, with an especially high number linked to white supremacy. They include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 Black shoppers dead and a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings,” the report from the group’s Center on Extremism says.
Between two and seven domestic extremism-related mass killings occurred every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s, but in the 2010s that number skyrocketed to 21, the report found.
The trend has since continued with five domestic extremist mass killings in 2021 and 2022, as many as there were during the first decade of the new millennium.
The number of victims has risen as well. Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died in ideological extremist-related mass killings, according to the report. That’s much more than in any other decade except the 1990s, when the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people.
Extremist killings are those carried out by people with ties to extreme movements and ideologies.
Several factors combined to drive the numbers up between 2010 and 2020. There were shootings inspired by the rise of the Islamic State group as well as a handful targeting police officers after civilian shootings and others linked to the increasing promotion of violence by white supremacists, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL’s Center on Extremism.
The center tracks slayings linked to various forms of extremism in the United States and compiles them in an annual report. It tracked 25 extremism-related killings last year, a decrease from the 33 the year before.
Ninety-three percent of the killings in 2022 were committed with firearms. The report also noted that no police officers were killed by extremists last year, for the first time since 2011.
With the waning of the Islamic State group, the main threat in the near future will likely be white supremacist shooters, the report found. The increase in the number of mass killing attempts, meanwhile, is one of the most alarming trends in recent years, said Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal.
“We cannot stand idly by and accept this as the new norm,” Segal said.
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Protestors march toward City Hall in New Orleans to protest the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling June 24, 2022, that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. (photo: Piper Hutchinson/Louisiana Illuminator)
As networks, some clandestine, form to help women access abortion in the US, they look to Central America for a road map – and a warning.
“I couldn’t hear anything from the sidewalk,” says Ana,* referring to the women’s conversation.
“I think we’re OK,” says another. The rest are reassured.
In a green yard ringed by banana trees, on a breezy September afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the women introduce themselves using code names. They’ve left their phones at home so they can’t be recorded or tracked.
This is a clandestine abortion provision group, formed in the wake of Louisiana’s abortion ban to support those who still, inevitably, need abortion care. The fact of the group’s existence was spread by word of mouth, over secure messaging platforms and mentioned to female friends in low voices over drinks. Now, group members sit in a circle around a small wooden table that holds snacks and seltzer water, talking strategy.
“I bet there are tonnes of groups. I’d love to find them,” says Carina*.
The women, who come from a range of professional backgrounds, are all under 40. They discuss an upcoming virtual training with Paula Rivera*, an organiser from Honduras. A couple of the women, children of Central American immigrants, are fluent Spanish speakers, and they volunteer to translate the training so the English speakers can follow along. Rivera will discuss protocols for delivering safe medication abortions according to World Health Organization (WHO) standards, as well as physical and digital security measures.
They set a plan for where to do the training and agree to use a secure video platform, Jitsi. “I’d never heard of it,” shrugs Ana.
The app is the first tool they pick up from Central American organisers, who have been fighting abortion restrictions for years in their own countries. The knowledge and tactics of these organisers, with their decades of experience, are proving invaluable to those in Louisiana who are fresh to the fight.
Fighting back
On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that enshrined the right to abortion care. Abortion bans are now in place in a dozen states across the US, including Louisiana and every state bordering it. Abortion is illegal in Louisiana, with no exceptions for rape or incest. All abortion clinics in the state have closed.
While abortion is theoretically permitted for nonviable pregnancies, in practice, terminations on these grounds have already been denied to multiple women.
While the statute criminalising abortion exempts pregnant women from prosecution, legal experts say this does not offer meaningful protection from determined prosecutors. Those who assist a termination, such as the backyard activists or healthcare providers, risk up to 15 years’ imprisonment. Undocumented women suspected of facilitating an abortion risk both criminalisation and deportation. Lawyers with If/When/How, a network of legal professionals supporting reproductive justice, warn of a worst-case scenario in which people facilitating abortion in Louisiana could now technically be charged with the homicide of someone under 12 – a crime that carries the death penalty in Louisiana.
According to their research on criminalised abortions since 2000, published last August, even in states where laws didn’t specifically criminalise abortion, some women have still been charged under statutes related to the mishandling of human remains or practising medicine without a licence.
In the ban’s aftermath, activists are fighting back. As some advocate for change by challenging the law, others have already begun to form whisper networks, scrambling to organise abortion access. A child welfare worker, who asked not to be named, said advocates in Louisiana are helping minors, pregnant from rape, travel elsewhere for abortions. Non-profits are organising abortion access for Louisianans by post, boat, and even private plane.
And in New Orleans, women are drawing from the tactics of organisers like Rivera in Honduras, one of the most abortion-hostile places on the continent, where abortion has been outlawed since 1982. That is in part because New Orleans is home to the largest Honduran-American community in the US, a legacy of successive waves of immigration – most recently following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when an estimated 100,000 Hispanics came to rebuild the stricken city. Abortion is illegal in Honduras, without exceptions, even if there is a threat to the woman’s life.
Women’s struggle to circumvent the ban in Honduras, delivering abortion medication and guidance around safe abortion care, offers a model for the American women now organising under the shadow of the law.
‘So taboo’
The day that Roe v Wade was overturned, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in New Orleans, marching through downtown.
Near the front of the crowd walked 29-year-old Edith Romero, a reproductive healthcare advocate who advises undocumented people and Spanish speakers on abortion and contraception. Romero came to New Orleans from Honduras about 10 years ago. As the sun set, she stood in front of the crowd on the steps of City Hall, carrying a cardboard sign reading “El aborto es un derecho humano” (“Abortion is a human right”), and took the microphone.
“My name is Edith Romero, I’m from Honduras, and I received an abortion last December,” she told the crowd to cheers of support.
Romero was there as part of Unión Migrante, an organisation for immigrants that works particularly with undocumented people in the New Orleans area by assisting with legal and economic support, reproductive healthcare, and rights education.
Soon after, Romero joined up with the newly-founded Louisiana Abortion Rights Action Committee (LARAC), which aims to build a mass movement to re-legalise abortion. She says she’s drawing from the work of Central American organisers such as those in Mexico who, after years of mass protests and civil disobedience, saw abortion decriminalised in 2021. “It was a lot of people in the streets demanding change and being loud and bold. And the government had to respond to that,” she says.
Romero is also doing outreach in the Latina community. She has found that Honduras’s long-standing ban has contributed to stigma around abortion within Louisiana’s Honduran-American community, which means outreach can be a challenge. “In the Latina community, abortion is so taboo,” she says.
The need for clandestine abortions due to stigma within the Hispanic community was something Cristi Fajardo, 44, founder of El Pueblo NOLA, a grassroots organisation run out of her home, was familiar with before the ban came into place.
Fajardo’s organisation helps Hispanics in New Orleans navigate legal, immigration, and medical crises. “We are the 911 of our community,” she says, referring to her being the first person women often turn to in an emergency.
An imposing woman with red braids, she reports with pride that several neighbourhood husbands are afraid of her. Fajardo originally hails from Brazil, where abortion is also a crime, though most of the people she helps are Honduran. These days, to better support her Honduran neighbours, Fajardo is learning Garifuna, an Indigenous language of Honduras.
Fajardo says more than a dozen women have asked for help accessing abortion since she founded El Pueblo NOLA in 2018. “Some just recently had babies and don’t want to have another,” she says. Others were victims of rape or incest.
Vulnerable and undocumented
Fajardo’s neighbourhood is 98 percent people of colour, and 22 percent live in poverty, meaning women there are made particularly vulnerable by the ban. She has already seen what it means for some community members.
In one case, Beverly, a Honduran mother in Fajardo’s community who was barely 20 and financially stressed, discovered that she’d become pregnant by her cousin. Beverly, who only wanted to give her first name, already had a chronically ill infant to care for, and now feared she would be left homeless. She approached Fajardo about terminating her pregnancy and Fajardo helped her make an appointment at the New Orleans clinic. Before Beverly could have the procedure, abortion was criminalised. Facing homelessness, Beverly moved to New York, where she says she is receiving more substantial state support. Beverly ultimately gave up on seeking abortion care. The child she carried in New Orleans was born in New York in January.
Romero is in frequent contact with undocumented and low-income women, who face higher barriers to healthcare access. Reproductive healthcare access “was already pretty horrible, especially for people of colour and undocumented immigrants. And now there’s no options” for legal abortions in Louisiana, explains Romero, a slight woman with a determined set to her jaw.
Abortion care, like healthcare generally, was hard for undocumented people to access before the ban due to costs, language and transportation barriers, and other restrictions. For instance, Louisiana, like most US states, does not allow undocumented people to have driving licences, meaning that using a car carries the risk of arrest and deportation. A lack of health insurance, finances, and discrimination compound the difficulties of accessing help. This increases the health risks women may face, according to Romero.
“If somebody has a self-induced abortion and complications, they’re going to be scared of going to the emergency room,” she says.
Romero was in part drawn to the reproductive health movement because when she was younger, in Honduras, she saw firsthand what a lack of choice and sexual education meant for women’s health and safety. “Coming from Honduras, you don’t get sex education,” she explains. “I definitely saw a lot of teenage pregnancies in Honduras. Very, very high [rates], and of cervical cancer as well.”
Cervical cancer, whose incidence can be reduced via education and screening, is the leading cause of cancer deaths among Honduran women.
But Romero believes there is a lot to glean “from the [abortion organising] efforts that are going on in Honduras, which is an even more hostile environment for organising” than Louisiana.
Learning from a veteran activist
On an October afternoon, the backyard crew arrange themselves on couches and on the floor, phones absent, to hear Rivera give the training for delivering clandestine abortion care based on strategies developed over decades.
The 60-year-old veteran women’s rights activist is speaking over video from her home in Honduras, occasionally cracking jokes from behind large glasses that soften her eyes.
“What we are doing is politically charged,” she begins, pausing so Ana can translate from Spanish. “But it is absolutely legitimate. Men may make the laws, but we know what we need.”
She sits down, lights a cigarette, and launches into the training. It’s thorough and lasts for three hours. She begins by going over the WHO’s definitions of pregnancy, early-term and late-term abortion. Then she reviews the history of the two medications used for abortion – mifepristone and misoprostol – how they work, and how to use them effectively.
“Mifepristone is not available in Honduras,” Rivera says. When possible, activists acquire it from Mexico, where it is legal. “Mexico is the salvation of Central American countries,” Rivera adds before sharing contact information for her own sources in Mexico who can help secure low-cost, legitimate abortion pills. Carina writes them down on a slip of paper.
The women in the room say that they, too, have an easier time acquiring misoprostol.
“Bien (good),” says Rivera, “Then let’s talk about how to administer an abortion with misoprostol alone.”
Then they cover patient care, contraindications, side effects and follow-up. Next, it’s security protocol: use secure messaging platforms, burner phones, code names and coded language. Ask the patient if they’ve told anyone else they’re getting an abortion, Rivera says, and if they did, come up with a cover story together to explain the pregnancy loss.
Rivera suggests transporting the abortion medication to patients discretely in a Pringles can: “First the chips,” she says, miming the actions while smiling over video, “Then the medication, and then the chips.”
Rivera says she herself learned much of this from organisers in Costa Rica, where abortion is allowed only if the mother’s life is at risk. Before she hangs up, the dozen women squeeze together on the floor in front of the web camera and wave, grinning, with a chorus of “Thank you!” and “Gracias!” as Rivera, smiling, waves back.
A palpable contentment fills the room. The women make plans for the next meeting, then file out, chatting animatedly. Outside, after a month of drought, sorely-needed rain is beginning to fall.
What a lack of choice means
Rivera knows that the fight for reproductive rights comes with risks. She and her Honduran colleagues have been defamed and threatened by hardline religious groups because of their work. Her office has been searched by state authorities, and religious anti-choice groups have tried to infiltrate her network. Lately, her official work focuses on legal advocacy, fighting the ban’s constitutionality in Honduras’ Supreme Court.
Her work providing abortion care is “constitutionally prohibited … it implicates me in a crime … it could lead to many years in prison,” she explains. This is why she is careful to take precautions.
Despite the risks, Rivera and others in Honduras press on because they are keenly aware of how the lack of choice touches all aspects of women’s rights.
“Forced maternity has huge consequences long term, physically, but also economically and socially,” says Rivera, speaking to Al Jazeera over video one afternoon. “It affects their lives as well as the lives of the children born, who might not be welcomed, and who might never experience security in their lives.”
In places where abortion remains illegal, women can lose access to education and career prospects due to forced pregnancy. Most sexually active 15- to 19-year-olds in Honduras said in a national survey that they did not want to have a child in the next two years; half of them will likely give birth by age 20. “This is a really brutal and terrible life change for many of them,” says Rivera.
Criminalising abortions can push people to seek unsafe options.
Neesa Medina, 35, a campaigner with Somos Muchas, a Honduran umbrella organisation of several reproductive justice groups, says dangerous practices happen particularly in rural areas with less access to information and medication. “What we are seeing is people who are doing very harmful practices, like throwing themselves from trees to have an abortion,” she says.
Others “put sharp objects [inside themselves]” – which can lead to infections or more serious complications – or drink unsafe concoctions containing herbs and clay. They do this out of desperation, Medina says, despite the risks both physical and legal. Honduran law imposes jail sentences of up to six years for those who facilitate an abortion. According to an investigation by Somos Muchas, 47 women faced criminal charges for abortion in Honduras from 2006 to 2018.
Honduras offers a portrait of the structural consequences of forced pregnancy, says Medina, who notes that opportunities there are limited and that women’s financial independence and safety are threatened. “It’s no coincidence that countries where you have total bans on abortion are countries where you have higher rates of sexual violence,” she says.
Abortion restriction “creates a social fabric that is so thin for the dreams of liberty of women and girls”, Medina says.
‘We still find ways’
Many Honduran women, who may not know about abortion networks, are forced to turn to the unregulated supply of medication on the black market. Sellers, typically found on social media, are motivated by money – not women’s health, say activists.
Sellers “don’t do the math correctly to calculate how many weeks they [the women] are pregnant. Because they are looking at it as a transaction, not a [medical] service,” says Rivera.
Misoprostol, which is also prescribed to treat ulcers, costs about $6 legally. But “the people who are trying to make money off of this will sell the misoprostol for $60 a pill,” Rivera says. The WHO “designates that someone should take a round of 12 pills. And they’ll sell just one to someone.”
This can result in unsuccessful terminations, she says. Sometimes, women will believe they’ve had a successful abortion only to discover, weeks or months later, that they’re still pregnant. “It can lead to really dangerous situations.” An incomplete abortion can lead to haemorrhage, infection, and sepsis.
Still, clandestine doesn’t have to mean unsafe, activists say.
Well-managed clandestine support groups in Honduras, Rivera explains, provide legitimate and sufficient doses of misoprostol and mifepristone – and ensure women are informed and supported, so they don’t resort to riskier approaches or self-harm.
Rivera says her group does not administer abortions that require clinical settings, such as vacuum aspiration abortions. But with the medication, they can assist patients who are up to 19 weeks pregnant.
When Romero received abortion care in 2021, she wound up translating for a Honduran woman in her mid-40s, who explained that she had self-administered an abortion the previous year, back in Honduras, with misoprostol from the black market. “It caused her complications,” Romero says. “She told me she’d had to go to the ER.”
Medina believes that the formation of covert abortion provision circles like the one in the Louisiana backyard is both inevitable and necessary.
“Even within very, very restrictive environments like ours, we still find ways” to exercise the right to choose, she says, referring to underground networks in Honduras. “Everyone in the [United] States that are seeing their rights being cut back: people there will find a way, too.”
Getting the protocol down
A month after Rivera delivered the training, the backyard crew meets again, at a different home – never the same meeting place twice – to go over what they have learned.
Outside, rain is hammering the papaya trees, but it’s cozy indoors. The women have brought each other food – black-eyed peas and sweet potato fries – and once they’ve settled in, they start to outline a health and security protocol based on Rivera’s guidance, writing in black marker on the back of a paper grocery bag.
Since they’re anxious about putting any information online, it’s all handwritten or passed along orally. Repeating it over and over, they agree, helps them to remember.
Ana reads through her own takeaways from Rivera’s training. “The first thing to say,” she reminds the others, “is to tell the patient that this is very safe. You’re not going to die. You’re not going to be left infertile.”
Cypress* writes it on the paper bag, which the women will later finalise into a protocol. Rivera also told the backyard crew that her group uses a small, portable ultrasound with patients. These are used to check for ectopic pregnancies – a potentially life-threatening condition where the fertilised egg implants outside the uterus – but also as a safeguard against anti-abortion rights activists trying to infiltrate the network by posing as some who needs care. During the training, Rivera had warned the Louisiana women that such people sometimes send fake ultrasound photos, pretending to be pregnant, in order to get incriminating evidence on Rivera and her colleagues.
It was a risk the Louisiana women hadn’t thought of. They discuss whether an ultrasound is in the group’s budget. Ana writes a note to herself: Ask Paula what type of ultrasound they use. Then she turns to Maria*, one of the group’s native Spanish speakers, and asks if she’ll help her to translate messages with one of Rivera’s Mexican contacts.
As they finalise protocols, they exchange notes about recent deliveries. Ana, who provided abortion pills to a 17-year-old over the summer, noted she should have better disguised the medication rather than leaving it in its original packaging. Jennifer*, who recently provided pills to a teacher from western Louisiana, discussed the difficulty of providing care instructions when meeting in a public place.
These unforeseen difficulties, the women agree, are why they need firm protocols and an intake process for patients who approach them. As Rivera explained, “It’s not enough to just be a feminist. You also have to be a very responsible person, because we’re dealing with people’s health.”
‘We have to keep fighting’
“When the [Roe v Wade] ruling came through, I felt helpless,” says Jennifer, at a cafe sidewalk table in New Orleans shortly after Rivera’s training. “I was – and still am – very angry. So it felt really good to just be like, ‘F*** all of this. I’m doing something.’”
Jennifer says she appreciated how clear and careful Rivera was in her training. “That gave me great comfort. This person has been doing it for so long.”
Jennifer was also fortified seeing Rivera’s approach, which she described as “DIY” (do it yourself). “The sense I got from her is that she was similar to me. Just a person who was like, ‘F*** this. I’m going to do, going to learn, whatever it takes” to ensure people have access to abortions. That perspective “made me feel stronger,” Jennifer says.
Rivera, for her part, is gratified to see women in the US take up the mantle. “We have to keep fighting,” she says at the end of a video interview, stubbing out a cigarette. “Those of us that were born with that right, we have to make sure we get it again.”
Medina has lived her whole life in Honduras without legal abortion, but says, “I speak to you from a place of hope.” She is strengthened by the work going on around her. “Networks save us. Feminists around the world save us. Women around us save us.”
A representative of Lift Louisiana, a reproductive justice non-profit, said they do not expect abortion to be decriminalised in Louisiana barring action at the federal level. Louisianans can expect abortion to be illegal for years.
Speaking to Rivera, Jennifer felt her years of experience “coming through”.
“It made me realise, in a deep sense: this is not going away. This is going to take a long time,” Jennifer explains. Still, she is optimistic.
“We’re on the very beginning of something,” she says, “and we can really make it work.”
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Climate change is making disasters like hurricanes more devastating and frequent, and Floridians are already being forced to flee. (photo: Visit St. Pete)
As many residents will be proud to tell you, the thousand-odd islands that make up the Florida Keys are one of a kind: there is no other place in the world that boasts the same combination of geological, ecological, and sociological characteristics. The islands have a special, addictive quality about it, an air of freedom that leads people to turn their backs on mainland life.
The Keys are also the first flock of canaries in the coal mine of climate change. Over the past few years, the residents of these islands have been forced to confront a phenomenon that will affect millions of Americans before the end of the century. Their present calamity offers a glimpse of our national future.
Nature is changing. Today's hurricanes tend to be stronger, wetter, and less predictable than those of the last century. They hold more moisture, speed up more quickly, and stay together longer. It's difficult to tell for certain what role climate change plays in any individual storm, but in the case of Hurricane Irma — which slammed the Keys in September 2017 — there is little doubt that the warmth of the Caribbean Sea made the storm more powerful, allowing the vortex to regain strength overnight as it barreled toward the islands. As global warming continues to ratchet up the temperature of our oceans, we can expect more storms like Irma. The danger to the Keys doesn't end with hurricane season, either: a slow but definite rise in average sea levels over the past decade has contributed to an increase in tidal flooding, leaving some roads and neighborhoods inundated with salt water for months at a time.
In the five years since Irma, the bill has come due. The hurricane made undeniable what previous floods had only suggested: that climate change will someday make life in the archipelago impossible to sustain. The storm was the first episode in a long and turbulent process of collapse, one that will expand over time to include market contraction, government disinvestment, and eventually a wholesale retreat toward the mainland. Irma may not have destroyed the Keys in one stroke, but the storm ran down the clock on life on the islands, pushing conches (the Keys' unique name for residents) into a future that once seemed remote. The impulse to stay, which once bespoke a conch's devotion to his or her adopted home, now looks a little more like denial. The decision to leave, on the other hand, which once signified surrender, now looks more like acceptance of the inevitable.
Florida's Great Displacement
The term "climate migration" is an attempt to explain why people leave one place in favor of another; it assigns motivation to movements that may be voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent. Yet even if the primary cause for migration is clear, there are still countless other factors that influence when, where, and how someone moves in response to a disaster. It's this messiness that is reflected in the word "displacement": the migratory shifts caused by climate change are as chaotic as the weather events that cause them.
For some families the decision to depart the Keys was easy. The storm was a traumatic event, more than enough to convince many people that life on the islands was too dangerous to accept. They came back home, fixed up their houses, and got out. That was the case for Connie and Glenn Faast, who left the island city of Marathon for the mountains of North Carolina after spending almost 50 years in the Keys. "It was pretty much immediate," Connie told me. "It's just too hard to start over when you get older. We couldn't risk it."
The Faasts had lived the kind of life you can only live in the Keys: Connie worked on commercial fishing boats and in a local aquarium, while Glenn owned a boat maintenance company and raced Jet Skis in his spare time. They had stuck it out in the Keys through several major storms, including 2005's Hurricane Wilma, which brought five feet of water to their little island and totaled three of their cars; Connie still shudders when she remembers the image of her husband wading through the water around their house with snakes climbing all over him, clinging to him for shelter from the flood. The Faasts had second thoughts after that storm, but the Keys were paradise, and besides, they didn't know where else they would go.
When Irma came 12 years later, though, the choice was much easier. During the evacuation, it took the Faasts a week to find a decaying hotel in Orlando where they could wait out the storm. As the hurricane passed over the center of the state, it knocked out their power, leaving them and their pets to spend the night in 100-degree heat without air conditioning. "That was it for us," she said. They had to get out — not just out of the Keys, but out of Florida altogether.
When they returned to Marathon, they discovered that their home was the only one in the neighborhood with an intact roof. They put the house on the market as soon as they could, but it took a year for the place to sell, in part because property values had risen so steeply that most people in the area couldn't afford to buy.
The storm had scared many people off, but it had also destroyed a quarter of the Keys's housing stock, which drove up prices for the homes that survived. In the meantime, the Faasts saw their friends start to leave as well: one moved to Sarasota, another to Orlando, and a third friend, who had been the first-ever mayor of Marathon, talked about moving to central Florida.
"We thought it would be devastating when we left," Connie said, "because we love the Keys. But when we pulled out of there, we were so, so relieved."
No more housing
Hundreds of people like the Faasts left the Keys of their own volition in the years after Irma, deciding one way or another that the risks of staying there outweighed the benefits. But perhaps the more turbulent phenomenon after the storm was the involuntary displacement caused by the shortage of affordable housing on the islands. The storm destroyed not only the massive mobile home parks on islands like Big Pine, but also hundreds of so-called downstairs enclosures, small apartment-style units that sat beneath elevated homes.
It also wiped out dozens if not hundreds of liveaboard boats and older apartment complexes in island cities like Marathon. These trailer parks and apartment complexes had been havens for resort waiters, boat buffers, and bartenders, allowing them to get a foothold in an archipelago that had long ago become unaffordable for anyone who wasn't rich. Now all that housing was gone, and FEMA's 50% rule — which prohibits improvements to structures that cost more than 50% of its market value — prohibited most trailers and downstairs enclosures from being rebuilt.
Many of those who had been lucky enough to own small homes or campers hadn't been able to afford insurance, which meant they missed out on the payouts that went to wealthy homeowners and part-time vacationers. To make matters worse, the government of the Keys couldn't build enough new homes to fill the gap created by the storm: the state had long ago imposed a de facto cap on the number of building permits Monroe county — which encompasses the islands — could issue, an attempt to make sure the population did not grow too large to evacuate the islands in a single day. Thus it was impossible for most residents either to rebuild their old homes or to buy new ones.
Some of those who lost their homes were able to crash with friends and family, and others got by living in tents or trailers, but others resorted to a forest homeless encampment. The lack of housing made the storm survivors feel as though they were stuck in a permanent limbo: life on the islands became a game of musical chairs, in which only the highest bidders could end up with a seat.
Delaying the inevitable
Debra Maconaughey, the rector at St. Columba Episcopal Church in Marathon, spent the years after Irma trying to forestall this involuntary displacement. When the storm hit, Maconaughey and much of her congregation were in Ireland, retracing the steps of the original St. Columba, and by the time they returned to the Keys it was clear that housing would be the defining challenge of the next few years. "Everybody's house was destroyed. That's what people would need the most."
We were speaking in the church's open-air pavilion, where Maconaughey had been delivering outdoor sermons even before the coronavirus pandemic. Irma had weakened the timbers that supported the roof of the central chapel, forcing the church to move worship outside.
In the first week Maconaughey was back, she helped transform St. Columba's campus into a massive shelter for boaters who had lost their homes in the storm, cramming two dozen air mattresses into a loft that had previously been used for an after-school program. The next week, Maconaughey and her congregation installed approximately two dozen trailers around Marathon, giving the boaters a long-term place to stay.
Maconaughey knew there was no chance the county government would restore all the housing that had been lost in the storm, but after a year went by, she found herself shocked at how little had been rebuilt. A nonprofit land trust had erected only a handful of new cottages and a $50 million state program called Rebuild Florida had repaired only two homes, a pittance compared to the thousands of dwellings that had been swept away.
So Maconaughey called up the nonprofits who were funding St. Columba's relief efforts and made an unconventional proposal: the church, she proposed, would buy some derelict housing and fix it up. She had her eyes set on a leaky, mold-filled apartment complex in Marathon that had been condemned for sewage issues a few years earlier. The apartment complex finally opened in the summer of 2020, providing cut-rate housing to 16 families who had been staying on couches or in trailers since the day the storm hit.
Never coming back
But for every person who found permanent shelter, there were more who could not afford to wait for the islands to recover. This wasn't only because people didn't want to return, but also because there were no homes to which they could return. Maconaughey told me with distaste that in several places along Marathon's beachfront, developers have built single large mansions on lots that once contained three or four small homes each.
The lack of affordable housing in turn created a labor shortage: fire and police departments couldn't find enough officers to fill their shifts, boat maintenance companies struggled to locate buffers and repairmen, and many hotels went shorthanded through the on-season rush. When employers exhausted their hiring options on the islands, Maconaughey said, they started to hire workers from the mainland towns of Homestead and Florida City, who take a two-hour bus ride in either direction to work for minimum wage.
"I think people are really struggling, and it's just below the surface," she said. "We're a tourist area, so it's in our best interests to make it look nice from the highway, but there's hidden pain."
Maconaughey told me about the church sexton, Mike, who was driven out of the Keys by Irma. Mike showed up after the recession in a homeless shelter in Marathon. He was blind, and when he first arrived at the shelter he couldn't take a shower or put on clothes without assistance. After a year in the shelter, Mike started attending services at St. Columba, and soon displayed a great talent for weaving wooden canes and chairs, a craft he often practiced on the church pavilion after sermons. He also taught the kids in the after-school program how to play chess.
Mike was on the Keys as the storm approached, not with the congregation in Ireland. He first sought refuge in the massive Miami hurricane shelter, but by the time he got there, that shelter was full. As shelters in Florida all reached capacity, emergency officials herded evacuees from the Keys up toward Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, offering them bus transportation as far as they were willing to go. Mike was unsure when he would be able to return to the Keys, so he asked for a ticket to Minnesota, where he grew up. He was never able to get back.
"We kind of lost him," Maconaughey said. "He got on a bus to evacuate and now he's gone. He was a huge part of our community … You have to ask yourself, do you ever recover from something like this?"
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